


Silent Rider

by Elamarth_Calmagol, Kattungefisk



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Asexual Character, Black Breath, Depression, Elf Culture & Customs, Gen, Illnesses, Language Barrier, Mental Health Issues, Modern Girl in Middle Earth, Not 10th Walker, Panic Attacks, Queer Character, Slow Build, Social Anxiety, Uncanny Valley, bookverse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 45,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24727000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elamarth_Calmagol/pseuds/Elamarth_Calmagol, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kattungefisk/pseuds/Kattungefisk
Summary: Take me away from here.It's what Mallory wishes every night. But escape, when it comes, isn't all it promises to be. Adventures aren’t fun, and leaving your old life doesn’t solve your problems.  And in Middle Earth, there’s pressure that’s entirely different from filling out college applications or learning to drive.  What if her being here changes the story?  What if she sets off some butterfly effect that causes Sauron to win?
Relationships: Glorfindel & Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 170
Kudos: 186





	1. Prologue: Not a Hobbit Birthday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mallory’s sixteenth birthday is no better or worse than any other day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Story warnings: This story includes descriptions of anxiety, depression, and panic attacks, which sometimes includes dissociation. While I’m at it, there are also depictions of transphobia and sexism, mentions of sexual harassment and assault, mentions of past abusive relationships, non-graphic violence, and illness and medical treatment. (I am NOT talking about a COVID-type illness. I wrote most of this before I ever heard of the coronavirus. Be safe, cover your face in public whenever possible, and wash your hands.)

**_January 17, 2020_ **

Something was _wrong_.

Mallory was awake and alert in a terrified instant, as if a gun had gone off. She was shaking, her heart racing, clinging to her bedsheets and gasping for breath. Every instinct screamed at her that she was in danger. Someone had broken into her house – or there was a fire – or her heart had stopped.

 _No. It’s all right._ She curled up her legs and hugged them. _Nothing is happening. It’s just a panic attack._

But she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t _breathe_!

_This will pass. I’ll be able to breathe again, and I’ll get back to sleep, and in the morning, it’ll all feel like a dream._

She must have gone through this at least two hundred times. Hundreds of nights of panic attacks, and every time she’d survived it. She’d survive this one, too.

 _This will pass,_ she told herself, repeating the phrase over and over again. She tried to match her breathing to her words so that she wouldn’t hyperventilate and make herself light-headed. _This-will-pass_ in, _this-will-pass_ out. It almost drowned out the screaming voice of her fear.

It went on and on. She didn’t look at the clock to see how long. If she did, it would make her anxiety worse, and she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep afterwards. She just tried to force herself to focus on her mantra. If she only thought about how to breathe and not how terrifying this was, she would be all right.

Finally, she began to notice that it wasn’t so hard to space out her breaths anymore. The adrenaline left her shaking, and she squeezed her arms even tighter around her legs to get the tension out. But now, when she told herself that there was an end to all this, she believed it.

She lay in her bed until the shaking began to slow down and finally stopped. Then, she loosened her arms. If she didn’t move, didn’t open her eyes, she could get back to sleep and probably get a few more hours before she had to get up for school. So she stayed there, letting her exhaustion take over.

Another panic attack, another time she’d made it through. How many more would there be?

* * *

Mallory was still tired when her alarm went off. She stretched and dragged herself out of bed. Another day. At least she’d get to eat at a restaurant for dinner tonight – that was something to look forward to. It was her birthday, so she’d probably get a couple of presents, too.

She checked her phone as she got dressed and put up her hair. There were a couple replies to fanfiction reviews and comments she’d left, and someone had gotten up early enough to have left birthday wishes on Facebook. She responded to one of the review replies and went out for breakfast.

“Morning,” said Mom, making coffee. “How did you sleep?”

“Okay,” Mallory said. She had never told Mom about her nighttime panic attacks. She’d been scared to talk about them at first, afraid to hear someone confirm her belief that she was dying. Now, she knew what was really going on, but she still kept quiet because Mom wouldn’t understand. Once, she’d mentioned the idea that she might be depressed (which she was, of course, but she hadn’t been sure about it back then), and Mom had laughed and said that she had nothing to be depressed about. She couldn’t really tell her sister, either: Sandra already had enough going on in her life without worrying about Mallory.

“Happy birthday!” Mom said. “You’re sixteen! It’s so exciting!”

“Thanks.” Mallory poured herself cereal and milk. There was a birthday card from her grandparents at her place at the table. They hadn’t written much of a message, but they’d put money in it. She put it down and read the newspaper comics as she ate. Then, she got ready for school. Mom drove her there on her way to work, same as she did every day. She dropped her off down the street, and Mallory trudged to the main building.

School was… school. Mallory did well – she was always on the honor roll – but she was the kind of person whom everyone ignored, even the teachers. Most of the time, she was fine with that. She’d somehow gotten herself into a group of kids who ate lunch together, or at least in the same place, so she didn’t have the awkwardness of eating alone. They weren’t friends, but they knew her name, which was something.

“If I’d known it was your birthday, I would’ve brought cookies,” said one of the girls. Of course, that was easy for her to say now that it was too late to do anything about it.

Mallory went home on the bus and started her homework. It was easier for her to focus if she went straight to doing it once she got home. There was reading for history, vocabulary for science, and the obligatory page of math questions. Mom came home at some point, but she didn’t come to her room to talk to her.

“Mallory!” she called from down the hall, maybe an hour later. “Your brother’s on the phone!”

On Mom’s phone? Mallory pulled out her own phone to see if she had a missed call. Out of battery. Oops. She hoped Sandra wasn’t mad at her for forcing her into an unplanned conversation with Mom. “I don’t have a brother,” she called back.

Mom appeared in her doorway with her phone in one hand and a box with crumpled wrapping in the other. “Look, do you want to talk to him or not?”

“No, I wouldn’t, but I’d love to talk to my _sister_.”

Mom looked at the ceiling in a this-generation-is-ridiculous look and handed over the phone, putting down the box. Making things look pretty was not one of Sandra’s talents, and this gift had probably gone through the mail.

“I’m sorry, I guess I forgot to charge my phone,” she said, waving at Mom to leave. “My fault.”

“Mallory!” Sandra said. “Happy birthday!”

“Thanks.”

“And don’t worry about it, I still have to talk to Mom one way or another. She’ll give in eventually. Besides, people misgender me all the time. I can take it.”

Mallory had always been surprised that Mom had a problem with Sandra at all. Considering she was afraid of men, it would have made sense for Mom to be happy to learn that Sandra wasn’t one, but apparently, if men were wolves to her, then trans women were wolves in sheep’s clothing. Also, she seemed to blame herself for not giving her “son” good male role models. But at least Sandra _could_ handle it. Mallory hadn’t even come out as asexual to anyone but Sandra and some people online. She couldn’t imagine what she would do if she had some identity that she couldn’t just quietly stay in the closet about, or that was so violently hated by society.

“Oh, Zee says happy birthday, too,” she added.

Zee was the person Sandra had been dating for the past year. “Tell them thanks,” Mallory said.

“So what have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

“No parties?” she asked, in mock horror.

“No.” Mallory sighed. “Can I come live with you?”

“Hmm, let’s check the date… by my calculations, in _precisely_ two years, you can live wherever you want. I should have a full-time job by then. I might even have money!”

Mallory managed to smile.

“Speaking of money, your present might possibly just be a box of free stuff I’ve picked up around campus. I mean, I’m not saying for _sure_ , but…”

“It’s okay,” said Mallory, laughing. Last year, she’d just given Mallory some crafts she’d made at a student event somewhere. “You’re still my favorite sister.”

“I’m your _only_ sister.”

It was an old joke, though of course Mallory used to say _favorite brother_ instead. But Sandra still seemed to like it, so Mallory kept saying it. “You want me to open your present now?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Sandra’s gift was a shoebox with a collection of random things inside: a few pens and pencils, a small notepad, a pocket-sized bottle of hand sanitizer, a pair of sunglasses, and a hand towel. All of it either had the logo of the school or a business on it. “Thanks,” Mallory said, trying to sound appreciative. “Pens and pencils are always helpful, and I can keep the hand sanitizer in my backpack and use it at school.”

“Good,” said Sandra. “I’m glad there’s something you wanted in there.”

“Yeah, thanks.” She glanced at the clock. “I should probably get ready for dinner.”

“Ooh, where are you going?”

“Some Italian place.”

“I’m eating Italian, too! Canned ravioli.”

Mallory laughed again.

“I’ll just keep dreaming of real food. Talk to you later.”

“Love you.”

“You too, sis.”

Mallory gave Mom her phone back, put her shoes on, and combed her hair. In her earliest memories, it had been a big deal to go out for dinner, even just to a fast food place. It had taken Mom years to pick herself up from leaving Dad. He’d kept almost everything, even things that Mom had owned before they’d gotten married, and there had been years of lawyers and court appearances to deal with afterwards. Mallory didn’t remember Dad like Sandra and Mom did – she’d been two when they left – but she remembered the effects he’d had on her life, and restaurant meals were part of that. Sitting down for something like chicken alfredo had only been for birthdays, something Mom would save up for. It wasn’t so exciting now, but they still went on birthdays, as a tradition.

“You want to drive?” Mom asked as they got into the car.

“No.”

“You need the practice so you can get your license. You’re sixteen. Most kids would have gone to have their test today.”

“I shouldn’t be forced to drive on my birthday. I’m supposed to be having fun today.”

Mom shrugged. “If you say so.”

They were quiet in the car, but she started up again after they got to the restaurant and ordered their food. “You’re going to have to think about what you want to do with your life,” she said. “You’ll be in college before you know it.”

“Yeah,” said Mallory. She knew that. But there wasn’t anything she _wanted_ to do with her life. She liked reading, and she liked reading analysis of books and movies. So she should study English, but she was a terrible fiction writer (she kept trying to start fanfics of her own and then quitting when she realized how bad they were), and even though she was a bit better with essays, she hated writing them. Anyway, she knew Mom would never go for her being an English major. Sandra had pushed it enough by aiming for social work, but at least jobs _existed_ for that, even if they didn’t pay well. And besides, social workers and women’s shelters had basically saved their lives when they had been hiding from Dad, so Mom couldn’t argue too much. The real problem was that Sandra had refused to go to school in the South, let alone in-state, so even with every scholarship imaginable, she would still be paying off student loans forever.

“Any ideas?”

“Not really.”

“You should talk to your guidance counselor. Maybe they could help.”

There was no way Mallory wanted to do that. That would require personally going to Guidance and asking for an appointment, and then being pulled out of class, which would attract all kinds of attention, to actually speak to someone. And the counselor would probably land on English, too, so the only benefit would be that she would be able to say an adult agreed with her.

“You have to make sure you make something better out of your life than I did.”

That was what it was all about. Do something so that you don’t end up with a husband who controls your life. Who hits you if you “embarrass” him in public. Who makes you beg for him to give you some of the money you earned at your own job. Who says everything he does to you is your own fault. Mom liked to imagine that if she had finished college, she might have left earlier. It probably wasn’t true, but in the end, everything piece of advice she gave came back to him in one way or another.

“You should think about a summer job. You can get paid, now that you’re sixteen.”

Mallory didn’t know how to answer that. The two weeks she’d had of sleepaway camp when she was eleven and twelve stood out in her mind as the best two weeks of her life. But she’d tried interviewing for a counselor-in-training program at a summer camp last year, and she’d completely blanked out and stumbled through messy half-answers once she got there. Nobody would hire her to work for money if she couldn’t even speak for herself in an interview. Besides, she had panic attacks at night now, so she couldn’t work at a sleepaway camp – someone might wake up and see what was happening. And she’d rather starve than work somewhere like McDonalds.

The conversation went painfully slowly until the food came. There wasn’t much to say after that. Mom ordered a slice of cake for dessert and convinced the waiter to put a candle in without singing “Happy Birthday” or making a fuss about it, because there were _some_ things she understood. Mallory looked at the burning candle and made the same wish she’d made on every birthday candle, every dandelion, every 11:11, every chance she’d had to make a wish for as long as she could remember: _Take me away from here._

Sure, she’d worded it differently when she was a kid, more like _Let me go on an adventure_ or _Send me a Hogwarts letter_. But it had always meant the same thing: _Take me out of this life and let me be part of something that matters._ These days, she didn’t even care about doing things that mattered. She just wanted to go somewhere else. To _do_ something else.

 _In two years, I can leave._ But the thought of those two years, stretching out in the same pattern of school-home-school-home-school-home, seemed endless. And even if she did go and live with Sandra, which would probably not be a particularly fun kind of adventure, she’d have months of high school left, and that would be at a new school where she didn’t have anyone to eat lunch with. Plus, with any luck, Sandra would be living with Zee, and Mallory hadn’t even met them, not in person. And what was really the likelihood? She’d probably go to the University of Georgia to get in-state tuition. God, she’d probably go to a university there in Atlanta and never even leave Mom: that would be easier. And it would just be more of the same for four more years.

 _It’ll pass by before I notice it, like Mom said,_ Mallory thought. _Just keep going, and time will pass, whether you try or not, and one day you’ll have your own house or apartment and your own job._

And that was going to be so much better?

After they ate the cake, Mom handed her a small present. She unwrapped it and found a silver necklace with an M on it. “I couldn’t find anything that said _Mallory_ ,” Mom explained.

“It’s nice.”

“Can’t you be enthusiastic about _anything_? You would have loved this a few years ago.”

Would she have? Probably. Or at least she’d have been better at faking it. But it was just a necklace. Sandra’s collection of free stuff was at least useful, if not very interesting.

“Can’t buy you earrings, can’t buy you necklaces, don’t know what books you’ve already read or which ones you want…”

Mallory instinctively reached up to twist one of her earrings. She wore them day and night – it was easier not to have to make any choices or think about them. _You could buy Sandra jewelry,_ she thought. Even Grandma had once, although she seemed to have the impression that Sandra was a drag queen who dressed like a woman for fun. But all Mallory said was, “I’m ready to go.”

Back home, she finished her homework as she watched one of the Harry Potter movies. Once it was over, she got ready for bed. She usually read for an hour or so before she turned out her lights. This time, she skipped the dystopian novel she was in the middle of reading – too realistic – and pulled out her copy of _The Return of the King_ instead. _Lord of the Rings_ was always a comfort when she was feeling bad. The world was detailed enough that she could disappear into it, and in the story, everything seemed hopeless but still somehow came out all right in the end.

She was at Cirith Ungol now, and last time she’d had it out, Sam had just found Frodo. She’d fallen into a habit of reading the same bits over and over (the Mirror of Galadriel, Éowyn and the Witch-King, and Éowyn and Faramir at the Houses of Healing) but she’d finally decided she needed to read it from the beginning again, even if she only took it out every week or two. Somehow, even though she spent so much time with the books, this was only her second time reading it all the way through, and she was surprised how much she’d forgotten. It was good to get back to basics.

Finally, she felt tired enough to put the book down and turned out the light. She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing. In and out and in and out. If she just kept breathing, she would get to sleep. And hopefully, considering she didn’t usually get panic attacks more than once or twice a week unless there was a group project or finals or something else that was stressing her out really badly, she’d stay that way until morning.

She was only half right. She did sleep, but she didn’t stay that way. Out of nowhere, she was wide awake and breathless with fear. Her heart was racing, a band squeezing her chest. She wrapped her arms around her knees. _Nothing is happening,_ she reminded herself. _It’s just a panic attack._

Only, the sun was shining through her eyelids. It shouldn’t be this light until she was arriving at school. She must already be late. But it didn’t feel like morning, it only felt like she’d slept a few hours. And why hadn’t Mom woken her up? She’d had alarm clock problems before, and Mom always noticed. Was there something wrong with her? But the chances of Mom getting sick on the same day Mallory accidentally turned off her alarm were basically zero. It felt like she was lying on the floor, too, not her bed. Something was wrong. Something was capital-W Wrong.

She went numb. Distantly, she knew where the ground was and the way her arms held onto her legs, but she didn’t feel anything. She couldn’t tell herself things were all right, because she knew they weren’t. She couldn’t tell herself this was nothing. She couldn’t even tell herself _this will pass_ , because she had no idea how long the panic attack would last, and the whole time she’d have no idea what was going on or when she’d get to school.

If she couldn’t control herself, she was sure she was going to pass out. Then again, if she was unconscious, her brain wouldn’t be telling her body that it couldn’t breathe, so she couldn’t die or anything. But what if she could? What if she just breathed less and less until she suffocated?

_This is a panic attack. My mind made it all up. I’m going to live through it._

But she’d overslept. _Overslept_.

From a long way away, some part of her decided to open her eyes and start to figure out what the problem was. So her eyes opened, almost of their own accord. They looked around at where she was.

And then she closed her eyes, covered her face with her hands, and lost it completely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here are the answers to the questions I always have when I’m deciding whether to read a Girl-Falls-into-Middle-Earth story:
> 
> 1) This story is book verse. Obviously it isn’t completely canon-compliant, but I did a lot of research to try to make things believable.
> 
> 2) No magical abilities, no morphing into an Elf or hobbit, no mistaking locals for LARPers, not a tenth walker, Boromir will not live, etc.
> 
> 3) Most of the plot is character-based, but there’s some adventure, too.
> 
> 4) I’m still a bit up in the air over whether there’s going to be romance. What I can say is that you shouldn’t read this looking for romance, and Mallory will not change her sexual orientation. Some aroace people choose to be in relationships.
> 
> 5) This is Part I of a hopefully-four-part story that is about half written.
> 
> Also, fair warning, I write ridiculously long author’s notes. This is a short one by my standards.
> 
> Beta by Xrai.


	2. #1: Through the Looking-Glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mallory is very much not on the floor of her bedroom. So where is she, and who brought her here?

**_October 1, T.A. 3014_ **

Eventually, the panic attack ended, if only because it had to. Mallory’s body couldn’t take any more. She lay shaking, her muscles tight, trying to decide whether screaming would attract the right kind of attention or wrong, or any attention at all.

Mallory wasn’t in her house. She was outside. And not an outside she recognized. She was lying on a flat rock, surrounded by grass and wildflowers, overlooking a river. This wasn’t home, or her yard, or any place in town that she had ever seen. It didn’t even look like Georgia. It didn’t look like it was January, either. What sort of place had wildflowers in January? And there were dying lilies in the water. It had occurred to her that she might have been drugged, maybe even that she’d been out long enough for her captor to move her to another state, but if entire _months_ had passed since the last day she could remember, she was in major trouble.

 _Take a deep breath,_ she thought. _There’s nobody around, so you’re safe for the moment._

Of course, that also meant there was nobody to save her. She didn’t hear cars. If she’d been purposely abandoned here, it was probably a long way from anywhere. You didn’t dump kidnapping victims by main roads.

She sat up, trying to breathe, and looked around again. Were those sheep in the grass across the river? Where would she find _sheep_ wandering around?

One of the sheep lifted its head as if it was looking at her, then flicked its ears and went back to grazing. Mallory shook herself and took another breath. She had to think logically. But thinking logically only made her more scared. Dad had threatened to kill Mom before. Mom had always said it was an empty threat, and she knew him better than anyone else, but if he could get in and take Mallory, he could do anything he wanted to Mom.

And Sandra? He probably didn’t know she was up in New York, and he probably didn’t know she’d transitioned, but she couldn’t be sure. Anyway, she hadn’t legally changed her name. It couldn’t be that hard to figure out that their new last name was “Sutton”, and he knew their first names. With that, he could find her. And even if he hadn’t originally planned on killing them, what was he going to do when he found out that she was a girl?

Mallory wasn’t in New York, though. It would be freezing cold there, and she wasn’t exactly wearing warm clothes. In fact, she was in her pajamas. Her earrings were on, like they always were. Her hair was the same as it had been last night, and she could see where she’d recently filed off an edge of one of her nails. Logically, then, she hadn’t been gone for months. She could cross that fear off her list.

But Mom might be dead. And Sandra might be next. And she didn’t even know where she was or where to go. There were sheep, so that implied civilization, but in which direction? Should she just wait for a shepherd to come and pick them up? She didn’t see a sheepdog anywhere. Maybe she could follow the river. She’d heard somewhere that you should do that when you were lost because there were always people living near rivers, but it might take her days to find anyone. And she could drink the water down there, but she didn’t know if it was clean. She didn’t have food, and she was barefoot and in her pajamas. She also wasn’t wearing a bra. She couldn’t live without a bra. She wouldn’t even walk around without one at home. But now, she was stuck with nothing to put on. And she didn’t know what to do to get anything she needed.

In the midst of her spinning thoughts, Mallory heard a scuffling noise. She turned to look to see who or what was there, but the first thing she noticed was a book. Her book. A green-spined paperback with the white city of Minas Tirith on the front: _The Return of the King_. There it was, sitting on the ground, only a few feet from her. She had just been too busy looking at the river and flowers and sheep to notice it in the grass.

That was when she saw the source of the noise. Standing next to it was an animal with a black and white striped face and coarse gray hair on its body, but without the big, fluffy tail of a skunk. It was maybe the size of the dog, and it looked right at her as if it knew who she was, the hair on its back raising up.

She stared. Was that a _badger_? That made even less sense than the sheep. Where _was_ she? England? _Curioser and curioser_ , she thought, staring at the strange scene.

There was movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned to see one of the sheep leading the others up over one of the low hills. Great, no rescue by shepherd, then. The last sheep in line paused and looked at her, then trotted to catch up with the rest.

But she didn’t have time to think about their behavior. She turned back to see that the badger was moving in her direction. When it saw her looking, it stopped and hissed. She didn’t want to get close to a wild animal – she was already closer than she would have liked – but she needed to get the book. It was probably wet and dirty. She’d always been careful with her books, and more so with ones that matched the other books in their series, which this one did. If she got back home, she wanted it intact.

Oh, God. She was being completely ridiculous. She was facing a potentially aggressive animal in her pajamas and she still didn’t know where she was or why, but she was worried about whether her copies of The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion would all look alike! But nonetheless, she wanted to get the book before something happened to it. It was a clue, if nothing else.

She slowly stood up, not taking her eyes off the badger. As she did, the badger stood up on its hind legs as if it was imitating her. It let out a low growl. That wasn’t normal badger behavior, was it? This was so bizarre that it was beginning to feel like a dream. But if it was a dream, what was the deal with the panic attack? Or being in her pajamas? Or all the details of her surroundings? Maybe she was drugged after all, and hallucinating? This would be a really weird hallucination, though.

The badger dropped back down and started to walk towards the book, its lips curled back to show its teeth. Mallory didn’t know why she thought that it was going for the book – what interest would an animal have in reading something? – but she threw herself forward to grab it.

The badger ran with surprising speed, but Mallory had a lot more reach, and she grabbed it first. The animal lunged at her, and she dodged backwards just in time to avoid getting bitten, almost falling over. And that was the moment that she saw the other badgers.

Three more of them had appeared, chittering to each other. They looked at her the same way the first one had, giving her the sense that there were… well, if not human minds, at least human levels of intelligence behind their eyes. What the hell was going on? She scrambled backwards, but she was even clumsier than usual right now. She had the wrong clothes on, she was trying to protect the paper of the book, and there was a slope down the river only a few feet away from her. One of the animals hit her legs, and she wasn’t balanced enough to keep her feet. She fell backwards, one arm still around her book.

The first badger – the biggest one – walked up to her, hissing, and put its front paws on her arm. She froze, staring at it with wide eyes. _Don’t bite me,_ she thought. _Please don’t bite me._ They didn’t _look_ rabid, but she’d been warned her whole life about how dangerous it was to interact with animals that weren’t afraid of humans. Even if she found her way back to civilization in time, the possibility of rabies was terrifying. Besides, its teeth looked like they would make a serious wound, even on their own. But on the other hand, the way it looked at her reinforced the idea that they were intelligent. She had a strange sense that all of their noises were them talking, if only she spoke their language.

One of the smaller badgers took the book in its teeth, and another started to snarl. She was trapped. She had no way to run. So she did the only thing she could think of. “Stop!” she yelled. “Leave me alone!”

The lead badger looked at her as if it were laughing. But then, it turned and started chittering in a way that sounded alarmed.

Above the badgers’ noises, Mallory realized that she could hear a voice: a human voice, singing something bouncy and bright. She couldn’t make it out at first, but she was relieved at the sound. There was a person around, and if he were singing, he couldn’t be bad. Right? Well, it wasn’t Dad, at least. He didn’t sing. Or Mom had never said he did. She looked around for the singer.

A small man came running and leaping down the banks of the river, his steps perfectly matching the tune and tempo of his song. As he came closer, she began to notice something strange: his words didn’t make any sense. But a moment after the sounds came out, they somehow shifted in her mind, morphing into words that sounded like English. It was the sort of thing that would happen in a dream, where she knew all kinds of things she didn’t in real life – foreign languages, how to fight with a sword, her way around a city that wasn’t hers. So was she dreaming after all?

_“Hey, dol, merry dol! All along the river!_

_Ring-a-dong! The grass is long! The leaves they are a-quiver!_

_Hey, dol, derry dol! The sun it is a-shining!_

_Sing a song! Hop along! And Tom will go a-finding!”_

The man stopped abruptly when he saw them. He was short, with brown hair and a big brown beard, a blue coat over his clothes, and big yellow boots. He looked at the badgers, frowning, and then he spoke to them, as far as Mallory could tell. “Hey, now, Badger-brock, what mischief are you up to?” he asked. Again, she could tell for sure that he wasn’t speaking English, but an instant after the words reached her ears, they changed into something that made sense. “Who told you to come here, eh? What business is this of yours?”

The badgers backed off, making quiet noises to each other. They almost seemed ashamed. Badgers. Ashamed. Now that she was free, Mallory sat up and crossed her arms to hide her chest. She eyed the small badger. Should she go for the book again? She wanted it out of the animal’s mouth.

“Come on, now! Give it back to her! She knows what to do with it! It won’t hurt you here!”

The badger that had taken the book stood up on its hind legs, took it out of its mouth with both paws, and held it out to Mallory. She hesitated, remembering its teeth. But this was her book. She reached out, and the animal gave it to her.

“Thank you?” she said.

The badgers scampered away. Mallory brushed off the book, assessing the damage. The tooth marks hurt her heart, but they were really only on the cover, not the pages. There wasn’t a lot of badger spit on it. On a shelf, just looking at its spine, it would match the others, but she’d notice it whenever she took it out.

“Mallory!” the man said. “Hello there!”

Mallory’s heart jumped to her throat, and she took a step back, away from him. How did he know her name? Was there even a point in asking questions anymore, in the middle of this nonsense?

“Friends of mine told me you were here at last,” he said, and to her relief, his words were just plain English, and she could understand them as they came out of his mouth instead of after a delay. It felt like everything had jolted back to normal. “I did not know when you would come. You are lucky they were watching!”

“What do you mean?” Mallory asked. She crossed her arms again, this time holding her book close to her chest. Was he a kidnapper, or in league with one? Or was he going to save her? Or was there some plan here that she had no idea about? “You expected me to come? I – Who are you?”

“You would call me Tom Bombadil,” he said. “Bombadil! What a wonderful name!” Then, he started singing.

_“Up and down and over-hill, here’s Tom Bombadil!_

_His boots are as yellow as a pretty daffodil._

_“It would be silly to Tom Bombadilly_

_To not bring his Goldberry a lovely waterlily!_

_“Collect it he will, yes, Tom Bombadil,_

_Then listen to the chatter from a great hornbill!_

_“Tom Bombadillo knows Old Man Willow._

_He sets him to sleep then fluffs his own pillow._

_“It needs no great skill for Tom Bombadil,_

_Merry old Tom requires only his will._

_“The lands change as they will, says old Tom Bombadil._

_Waters rise and mountains fall, but here he’s singing still!”_

She stared at him for a second. Then, she snorted and then started giggling. “You’re Tom Bombadil. You’re serious?” Of all the bizarre things that were happening, it couldn’t be more ridiculous than this. What kind of dream was she having? “So we’re in Middle Earth, then? I’m in Middle Earth? You’re trying to tell me that?”

“Tom Bombadil lives in Middle Earth, with Goldberry and Willow-Man, with Badger-folk and barrow-wights and Elves and hobbits, too.”

“I’m in Middle Earth!” She looked down at the book in her arms. No wonder the badgers were interested in it. Or were they scared? Either way, it would have to be a big deal, because it would tell the future. Or the past. Whatever. She was just the sort of person to have an adventure that was all about a book, of all things. Not dragons, or a ring, but a freaking _book_.

“You must keep it safe,” he said. “Now, you should come with me! Goldberry waits for you.”

She looked at him again. Was this really Tom Bombadil? She tried to remember what he was supposed to look like, beyond just a short man with a beard. And now she was going to meet Goldberry? Laughter came bubbling up again. “Oh God,” she said. “You’re serious. I’m in _Middle Earth_.”

Tom laughed with her. “Tom’s house has food and fire and room for you,” he said. “Come now! Follow me!”

Mallory stood up, but the whole thing sounded so absurd that she couldn’t handle it. “So I made a wish,” she said, trying to keep a straight face. “And for some reason, this was the one time it came true. I get to come to Middle Earth and have an adventure. And that adventure is to fight badgers and meet _Tom Bombadil_.”

She burst out laughing again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Poetry written with help from Kattungefisk. Read her excellent Girl-Falls-into-Middle-Earth story, <https://archiveofourown.org/works/14788151/chapters/34211945>.
> 
> 2) I know that some people find bras really uncomfortable, but I get a bit annoyed when people say that we only wear them because we’ve been brainwashed. I can’t function without a bra.
> 
> 3) I swear the badgers thing has a reason behind it. I was reading “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” poem to try to find inspiration, and I noticed that the antagonists in the poem were Goldberry (yes, really), Old Man Willow, Badger-folk, and a barrow-wight. Three of those showed up in the book, but the badgers are just a throwaway line in one of the conversations with Tom. So I had to use the badgers, whether I liked it or not.
> 
> 4) So funny story, I sort of fell backwards into writing this story. I’ve been making up Girl-Falls-into-Middle-Earth stories since I was ten years old. I think this one started in college, while I was getting into LotR fanfiction, specifically “Don’t Panic!” (<https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1690622/1/Don-t-Panic>) which is the best GFiME story in existence. So one day, right at the beginning of 2019, I got back into LotR fanfiction. I went back and read over my brief notes on all the stories I’ve played with and noticed how much I’d forgotten. I started coming up with new scenes for this fic, and then I thought, “I should really write this down before I forget it all again. And it won’t matter if I write it in order or just grab random scenes, because I know I’m never going to actually WRITE this fic.” Suddenly, two months later, I realized that I had twenty thousand words of disjointed pieces of scenes, and I went, “…Crap.” So, I started working on filling in the gaps in whatever order I wanted, which was fun. But the point is that I didn’t write any of Tom Bombadil until after the entire rest of Book I and about three quarters of Book II was finished, and this chapter was literally the last one of all of Book I.
> 
> Beta by Xrai
> 
> P.S. Does anyone want recaps of the previous chapter at the beginning of each new one? Or is it okay as long as I don't wait too long between posts?


	3. #2: In the House of Goldberry River-Daughter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mallory can’t decide whether she’s crazy or just having a really good dream.

_**October 1** _

Mallory followed Tom, because even if he wasn’t real, she wanted to go through with this story she had found herself in. And besides, what else was she going to do? She jogged after him, one arm around her chest and the other holding her book, struggling to keep up as he leapt ahead of her. It seemed like he never got tired, but she very much did. They ran along the river until she could see a house tucked into a hill. “Go down to the house!” said Tom. “Goldberry is waiting!”

Mallory slowed down, catching her breath. Her lungs hurt, and so did her feet, though the grass was a decent surface to run barefoot on. Okay. The house.

She walked ahead cautiously until she saw Goldberry at the door, waiting for her like she had done with the hobbits. She was taller than Tom but shorter than Mallory, with hair that was almost as yellow as a flower. Her clothes were white and silver, cold colors, but beautiful, like a photograph of a landscape covered in snow. “Welcome!” she called out to Mallory in English. “Come inside! I am glad to see you!”

Mallory stopped and stared at her and the house. She had never really taken the time to imagine it, or the two of them, but here it all was in front of her. The _actual_ Goldberry in front of the _actual_ house of Tom Bombadil in the _actual_ Middle Earth, or at least a very vivid dream of it. If she was going to find herself back home in five minutes, she wanted to remember what this looked like for next time she read the story.

So far, it looked completely ordinary, for an old-fashioned farmhouse. Then, she took a deep breath and went inside. To her surprise, there was a pool of water-lilies there in the main room. Water lilies Tom had brought in for Goldberry, like he had done when the hobbits had come to visit. It made the room look like a little preserved bit of summer, but it also looked like surreal art: a miniature pond inside a house. Yes, she was definitely in another world.

“Has – has a group of hobbits come recently?” she asked. “There were four of them? They had trouble with Old Man Willow?”

“Yes, indeed, the heroes of your book left us only a few days ago,” Goldberry answered. “But now is not the time to discuss them. Come with me!”

So they knew about the book. She really shouldn’t be surprised by that, she thought. Tom had known her name, and they spoke English, (well, sort of) so obviously they’d had some information or foresight or something.

She followed Goldberry, who took her arm and led her back to a room attached to the side of the house. Its ceiling sloped down towards the far wall, and there was a bed in one of the corners, like hers at home, with a tub of steaming water on the other side of the room. Clothes sat out on the bed, laid out for her. “Wash and dress, and then dinner will be ready,” Goldberry said.

It was dinnertime already? Mallory was hungry, but she was hungry for breakfast. Oh, well. Time-travel jet lag. She actually wanted to eat right now, but the water would get cold if she did, and she wanted to get real clothes on more than anything. Besides, it sounded like Goldberry wasn’t ready yet with the food.

She put the book down safely on a table, looking sadly again at the tooth marks. “Where’s the bathroom?” she asked. “I mean, the place with a toilet? I mean…?”

Goldberry laughed and led her outside again. “It will not be what you are used to,” she said. “But it will serve.”

The place Goldberry brought her to was an outhouse, but cleaner than she would have expected, with grass on the floor. Did the two of them even need to use it? Maybe better not to consider that. Mallory took care of things with relief and went back inside. Now, the bath. It was still warm, and it felt amazing on her muscles, which were tense from panicking and tired from running. She hadn’t had a bath rather than a shower in years, but right now, all she cared about was hot water. She almost forgot to actually wash: she just wanted to lie there.

Finally, she dried off and looked at the clothes on the bed. There was a dark blue, long-sleeved shirt with leather laces at the top. There were also tan leggings that had laces instead of a zipper and looser, sky-blue pants that went just below her knee and were secured at the top with a button. She hadn’t been given underpants, but when she put the leggings on, she found that they fit her upper legs so closely she couldn’t really have worn anything under them. Finally, most importantly, there was a bra, not all that different in shape from the ones back home, but with a button at the back instead of hooks. It didn’t have adjustable straps or an underwire, but when she put it on, it fit her even better than her own bras. It was a huge relief to put it on.

She flopped down on the bed, feeling about a thousand times more comfortable. Even with wet hair, she thought she could fall asleep right there.

She wasn’t sure how long she lay there before she heard her name. She got up, still tired, and went out. “Come!” said Goldberry, holding out her hand in welcome. “Join us and be joyous! There is food aplenty for you.”

And there was. Mallory felt a bit nervous at first, since she never really ate dinner at other people’s houses except her grandparents’, and a magic house with magic hosts was completely unfamiliar. But it was hard to stay nervous around Tom and Goldberry. Dinner was the same as what the hobbits had: fresh vegetables, berries, bread, honey, cheese, and water to drink. There was a thousand times more flavor in the food than what she got at the supermarket, and even though she ate past the point when she felt full, she didn’t get a stomachache. Magic food. Did Tom Bombadil accept the word “magic”, she wondered, or did he think it was as ridiculous as Elves did? Maybe it _was_ ridiculous. This was just who he was, him and Goldberry.

It was easy for her to talk, too. Easier than it had been for years, since before middle school came along and brought panic attacks with it, before Sandra came out to Mom and her classmates and all of the drama started. She told Tom and Goldberry about home and school. She even told them about fanfiction, though not the things that the fandom said about the two of them. Tom seemed to think the whole concept was funny, but she didn’t feel like he was laughing at her personally. It was nice, talking about something she liked without fear of judgement. She felt… happy? Alive? God, when was the last time she had felt alive?

After dinner, Goldberry cleaned up and Tom went outside, singing nonsense, so Mallory had time to think. Was this real? Had some higher power decided to fulfil her wish? Or was she just getting a dream or vision of that wish coming true? If so, wouldn’t there still have to be some higher power behind this? Surely she couldn’t imagine it all on her own.

Mallory knew about the obsession with girl-falls-into-Middle-Earth fanfiction. She’d been reading stories about runaways since she could read, but when it came to fanfiction, she preferred gap-fillers and romance fics. But the explanation she’d seen in the few fics of this kind she’d actually attempted to read was that the character had time traveled. The problem was that Middle Earth had no connection to her Earth. The maps didn’t match up with Europe or any other place in her world. Her planet hadn’t been created by a group of gods singing a magic song, either. Earth hadn’t even existed at the beginning of the universe – it had taken billions of years to form. Plus, in the Silmarillion, the world had been flat at first, and there hadn’t been a sun and moon, which was ridiculous from a scientific point of view. But even if you ignored all the creation story, there wasn’t archaeological evidence of Elves or hobbits or dragons or Minas Tirith or anything.

So if it was the past, something had fundamentally changed since then. Maybe all creation myths were true in one way or another. Maybe there were different worlds that all melted into her world at some point.

No, that was too weird. Was this another universe, then? There might be infinite worlds, and mind-bending math said that everything that could possibly happen would happen in one of them. So the argument would turn into whether or not it was scientifically possible for a world like this, with different rules from hers, to exist. She wanted to say no. Besides, even if it was an alternate universe, she still would have had to time travel, since the Ring had been destroyed a long time before she had read about it. Maybe time flowed differently in different universes. Or maybe this story played out many times in many worlds, which meant it might not exactly be the same this time around. That wasn’t a good option. That meant Sauron could win.

Or… or maybe she was in the book itself. She’d somehow been absorbed into it, brought into the world that Tolkien had imagined and created through his imagining. But then why wasn’t she with the hobbits right now? She hadn’t even been reading about Tom Bombadil last night. She had _The Return of the King_ with her here, not _The Fellowship of the Ring_. Then again, if she was in the middle of _The Return of the King_ , she wouldn’t be able to have the book in it with her, would she? The book couldn’t exist inside of itself.

 _Bookception_ , she thought, and then realized that absolutely nobody in this world would have had the slightest idea what she was saying or why it was funny if she shared that thought with them.

If she _was_ in the book, how would that work? She pictured herself running her hand through the lines of words on the page like she would do through water or sand, changing it as she went. If she met up with the hobbits, would someone reading the book suddenly see her name appear as part of the story? No, this explanation was just as bad as the other ones.

The simplest answer, when all was said and done, was that she was dreaming or imagining it all. But could she imagine this? Could she, who could barely write poetry and had never even tried to compose a tune, come up with Tom Bombadil’s song? Could she create two people she’d barely ever tried to imagine, and make them so realistic? Could she make herself feel hungry and then full, or invent the warmth of the bath? And why would she choose to come here and meet Tom and Goldberry, who she’d never thought of as belonging in the story? Wouldn’t she have gone to Edoras or Lothlórien, where her mind always was?

None of it made sense. But did that matter? She was here, in Middle Earth. She was in the same world as Galadriel and Éowyn, even if she wasn’t actually anywhere close to them. Besides, maybe she was better off here than she would have been at home. The way things were going back on Earth, maybe this was her chance to escape the apocalypse, possibly her only chance.

But then she was abandoning Mom and Sandra to deal with it on their own. She was abandoning Mom and Sandra in general, if she stayed here. Mom to loneliness and fear, and Sandra to climate change and transphobia and Russia and Iran and God knows what other horrors she wasn’t aware of yet.

But was she really gone? Maybe at the end of her adventure, she’d reappear at home right after she’d left, and they wouldn’t know she’d left at all. That seemed reasonable. Or maybe she was actually still back home, living her life. Maybe she’d split into two people, and if she went back, she’d pick up the memories of her life in between. She really hoped she hadn’t just disappeared: Mom’s mind would go to kidnapping or murder as quickly as hers had. Ironically, Sandra was into stories of the unexplained – mysterious disappearances and alien abductions and so forth – so maybe she’d be able to cope, but Mallory suspected she’d either get obsessively wrapped up in the mystery of what had happened or become so upset that she’d stop being able to enjoy those stories entirely. It would almost be better if Mallory were in a coma or dead in her bed, her spirit gone somewhere else. That thought was horrifying, but at least then, they wouldn’t have any reason to suspect foul play.

Tom interrupted her thoughts by dancing back inside. “Here’s Mallory, sitting by the fire! Come and tell me now, what thoughts are you thinking?”

“Nothing good,” she muttered. She took the book out and flipped to the appendices, looking for the dates. Eventually she found them in Appendix B. “What’s the date today?” she asked.

“Fall begins tomorrow. Summer is gone. The water-lilies will not bloom again ‘til spring.”

Mallory frowned. “The equinox? That can’t be right.”

“Do you think that Tom can’t tell the seasons? Tom remembers years with no day. Tom remembers years with no night. But tomorrow he has half of each!”

He _was_ talking about the equinox, then. That was wildly wrong. “But Goldberry told me the hobbits already came. They were supposed to have left on September twenty-ninth. The equinox is usually on September twenty-second, sometimes a day or two off, but never this late.” She’d always vaguely wanted to be pagan but had never had the motivation to actually learn how, and she liked the solstices and equinoxes.

“What’s September, eh?” he asked. “That word has no meaning! Tom isn’t ruled by words. Neither is the sun!”

“Oh,” said Mallory, suddenly realizing the problem. “Wait.” She flipped around the timeline. Yes, there was “Mid-year’s Day” and “1 Lithe” listed as dates. “This is the _Shire_ calendar. It’s different, is it? The months have thirty days, or something. So the equinox isn’t on the same day at all – not even the same month, maybe.”

Tom started singing.

_“The leaves will fall and grey rainclouds gather,_

_The birds grow quiet and the squirrels get fatter,_

_The Men will shiver and the hobbits toil,_

_Pumpkins and roots they’ll pull from the soil._

_“Then snowdrifts pile and the river be ice,_

_No creature will stir but the boldest of mice,_

_The days will darken but the stars shine bright,_

_Until the day when there’s only night._

_“Then flowers will burst where they were unseen,_

_The silent white will melt into green,_

_Sweet songs fill the air and Goldberry gleams,_

_She’ll visit her mother when ice becomes streams._

_“Then warm days will stretch into golden night,_

_And wood-roses will bloom under the brightest light,_

_The sun overhead as stars fall from the sky,_

_And hobbits devour each fruit in a pie!_

_“Leaves color again and drift to the ground,_

_And the warmth of the sun fades with no sound,_

_Until this day Mallory and Tom rest on,_

_And you think time need more than a song?”_

Mallory tried not to get annoyed: singing was how he expressed himself, after all. She looked for the explanation of the calendars, then flipped back when he was done. “How many days ago were the hobbits here?” she asked.

“Two days ago, I left them on the road to Bree.”

“So it’s the first of October. Only it’s _really_ the twenty-first of September. Assuming the equinox is on the twenty-second this year.” But it was weird to think that everything was ten days off. Not that ten days was that much difference, really: it was just that the fandom had chosen the wrong dates to celebrate Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday or the day the Ring was destroyed. Anyway, if they’d only left two days ago, she could catch up with them.

She laughed at herself. No, no, she couldn’t. Not even if she had a horse. They would already be out of Bree and off the road by now, and she’d just get lost in the wilderness looking for them. Besides, what would she say if she found them? How on Earth (or Middle Earth, as it was) would she convince them she could be trusted? Tell them that she knew about the Ring? No, they’d just think she was a spy. And then she’d be interfering with book events. What would she do on Weathertop? Would she let Frodo get stabbed, or would she try to stop it? If she did, would she get hurt instead? Or would Frodo suffer more later because he hadn’t learned whatever he was supposed to have learned from the experience?

Everything that happened in the book was important. Every little thing. If Gandalf hadn’t died, he wouldn’t have come back as Gandalf the White. If Boromir hadn’t died, Frodo wouldn’t have gone off on his own. If Merry and Pippin hadn’t been caught by orcs, they wouldn’t have met Treebeard, and Treebeard was absolutely critical, if not (probably) for the success of Frodo and Sam, then at least for the survival of Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli and everyone in Rohan. She didn’t know what the purpose of the Weathertop attack was, but she was sure there was one. Everything in the books had turned out exactly the way it was supposed to, and the slightest hint of a butterfly effect could destroy it all. If she tried to make things happen better, even with all the knowledge she had that not even the Valar shared, she’d probably screw it up entirely.

No. She had to stay out of the story. It was critical to the survival of Middle Earth that she didn’t interfere. Besides, she still didn’t know what would happen to the book itself if she suddenly showed up. She had to stay away from Frodo. _Far_ away from them.

But Tom had said she was here for a reason, and that did not bode well. Couldn’t she just live with him and Goldberry? No, she couldn’t, could she? They had their life here, and they had for millennia, probably. They could welcome her, but she wasn’t part of their family, even if she wanted to be. Was she?

“Your thoughts are like whirlpools,” said Goldberry. “Spinning, tightening, and pulling you down with them.”

“Sorry,” she said instinctively, before she even considered how Goldberry knew what path her thoughts were taking. Well, how had she known about the book, or made clothes that fit Mallory without having met her? Neither of them was mortal. They were probably more powerful than Elves, too. Maia-level, or actual Maiar, maybe. She didn’t think she’d be able to get them to tell her if she asked.

“ _Sorry_ will not help you!” Tom protested. “Think of happy things! Growing grass and running streams! Singing birds and yellow cream!”

Mallory laughed at his priorities, but he was right. She was in Middle Earth, the place of her dreams, and she was sitting and worrying. She might wake up any moment, ready to go to school for another day. She had to enjoy herself while it lasted.

As if to distract her, Tom told her a story about hobbit-children in Buckland. When he finished, Goldberry said, “I will go to bed, and you shall go as well. Tomorrow will be filled with as much excitement as today, and you must rest.”

“Oh,” said Mallory, disappointed. How many hours had she actually been awake? Could the day be over already? It wasn’t like she’d slept well last night, of course, and she was pretty sure she’d actually woken up at four or five in the morning by Georgia time, but… well, she’d expected there to be more to it than this. “But what if I wake up back at home?”

“You will not do that!” said Tom. “You will not go home until your task is done. No! You will be here at dawn, safe and sound, in Tom’s house.”

 _Not until your task is done._ There and back again. Okay. But she couldn’t go without trying to get more out of him. “You know why I’m here,” she said. “Are you going to tell me?”

“Tom didn’t bring you here,” he replied. “But he will send you on. And the first place I will send you is to bed!”

Goldberry walked with her to her room. “Do not fear anything here!” she said. “Not dreams, or noises, or thoughts that steal your breath.”

Steal her breath? How did she know about that? _Nobody_ knew about that (though they could probably guess if they connected the dots on the fact that she reblogged panic attack posts on Tumblr). But strangely, she didn’t mind Tom and Goldberry knowing. They were like family – or at least, they were what family should be.

She couldn’t wear her pajamas, since they were dirty from running around the riverbank and being knocked over by badgers, so Mallory just lay down in her bra and leggings. The bed was incredibly comfortable. She wanted to stay there forever. Goldberry left her with a candle, so she read the timeline in Appendix B again, from October 1 to March 25, the Shire Calendar day when the Ring was destroyed. She wasn’t going to be able to pull out the book and review it whenever she wanted to know when something was going to happen, so she had to know it in her head. But once the candle was out and she was alone, she suddenly started to feel like the house itself was alive. It was as if something was watching her from inside the walls, and if she looked in just the right place, she might see –

 _Do not fear_ , she remembered. She was safe in Tom Bombadil’s house. Nothing came in that he didn’t want to be there. Of course, that was also why people theorized that Tom Bombadil was secretly evil, because there were so many evil things that he allowed to live around him. Ridiculous, now that she had met him. Nobody in her life had ever seemed more pure and less evil than him and Goldberry, and she had never felt so at ease with anyone outside of her immediate family. She couldn’t imagine going home and trying to tell someone that, though. Funny thought, explaining to someone that they were wrong about some detail of _The Lord of the Rings_ because she’d actually been there. Nobody would ever believe her in a million years.

That thought relaxed her. She started trying to review the dates of the appendix in her head, and she almost immediately fell asleep, hardly any effort at all.

But when she slept, she dreamed.

First, she found herself looking into the room through the window of the room she was in, only now, there were four beds and a person in each one. She could barely see them in the darkness, but she knew exactly who they were. Who else could they be? And she was watching them, the way she had imagined that someone was watching her. Which of them had heard tapping at the windows that first night? She began to reach out towards the glass –

In the blink of an eye, the scene changed, and she was flying around a mountain, looking at black smoke in the distance and a shadowy cloud of something below her. There was an enormous black figure in the darkness, which she could make out to be humanoid only because it was silhouetted by the fire around it: flames down its back, a sword wreathed in red, and the curling line of a glowing red whip. And then, moving through the shadow, she saw its opponent, a smaller figure in dirt-streaked white and shining gold.

 _So_ that’s _what a balrog looks like,_ she thought idly.

The two combatants grappled, the balrog’s whip pulling Glorfindel’s head towards it, and then Glorfindel threw himself forward towards the cliff’s edge, and they both fell.

But before they hit the ground, the scene changed again, and it was dark, just a few pinpricks of faint stars. It was utterly silent for the first few moments. Then, she heard the sound of a horn in the distance. The rocks rumbled as the sound passed by. Afterwards it was silent again, not even an echo in her ears. There was almost a weight on her, or a pressure, compressing her chest, although it didn’t feel like a panic attack. She had the sense, somehow, that this was a different world, a sense that Gondolin had not given her. There were no growing plants, no sounds of any animals. This was a world asleep, with only her awake – her, and whatever was coming.

As she held her breath, her lungs compressed by the weight she felt on her, a sound exploded the air like a gunshot: the horn again, closer this time. She couldn’t move: she wasn’t even sure she had a body to move with. This time, once the horn blast faded, she began to hear hoofbeats, growing louder as she waited there. Then, straining to see in the darkness, she found the source of what she was hearing. At first, it was just glimmering light in the distance, and then it formed into something like a horse, its coat shimmering in the darkness, its eyes glowing gold, and sparks flying up from its hooves as it galloped, almost painfully bright in the darkness. The eyes of the thing that was sitting on its back glowed as well, an unnatural green, but they were set in what appeared to be the skull of a stag. The rider’s body was roughly human-shaped but covered in shaggy fur. It wore an enormous bow and quiver of arrows, and there was a horn in its hand. Behind it, fanned out in a clear formation, followed other animal-people, some with claws or fur or wings, all carrying hunting weapons.

 _The Wild Hunt,_ she thought. She could only pray that this was the forces of Valinor hunting down evil creatures. She didn’t think she would be able to tell the difference if it was the other way around.

She was not at all hidden among the rocks, but they didn’t look her way. She stayed in her suspended state, frozen, unnoticed, with the pressure on her increasing until she thought she was going to explode.

Then, one of the hunters paused.

This one had the head of a hawk and feathers down its arms and chest, with a silver bow in its hands. It turned, revealing burning golden eyes like candle flames, and it looked directly at her. There was almost surprise on its face as their eyes met.

And then everything went black, and Mallory did not remember any other dreams until the sun rose in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Poetry by Kattungefisk.
> 
> 2) I wrote the Russia and Iran line in January 2020, when war with Iran was my main worry. I thought I’d just adjust the things Mallory was thinking of when the time came to post it. But when I was editing during lockdown and ran into that paragraph… Well, I decided to permanently set the prologue in January 2020.
> 
> 3) The calendar was one of those moments when I read something in a fanfic I thought was obviously incorrect, then did some more research and learned otherwise. That’s one of the reasons I like author’s notes, so people know where I got the ideas from instead of just writing them off as wrong.
> 
> 4) That said, we don’t necessarily know HOW the Shire calendar matches ours. There’s a significant change of seasons happening when the hobbits arrive. Is that the equinox? If we match up the hobbits’ new year (2 Yule) to our Christmas, AND the equinox is on September 23rd this year, then the hobbits arrived on the autumnal equinox. But if that were true, Mid-Year’s Day wouldn’t be on the summer solstice. I’m matching those two days together instead, which puts our September 22nd (the more common day for the equinox) on the Shire October 2nd.
> 
> 5) Does anyone have any non-movie-inspired pictures of balrogs? I’d love to see one.
> 
> 6) If you don’t remember the beginning of the Silmarillion (because I didn’t when I started writing this), there WERE stars before Varda started her work, but they were distant and faint. She made the close and bright ones. Also, during the period between the time the Lamps were destroyed and the sun was created, there wasn’t enough light for plants to grow and the world was under the Sleep of Yavannah.
> 
> 7) I really like alien/eldritch abomination versions of the Valar. Ulmo is specifically described as taking horrifying and inhuman forms in the Silmarillion. Of course, he’s singled out as the only Valar who does that, but what purpose would any of them have in creating human forms before the Children of Illuvatar awoke? The picture inspired me was <https://essenceofarda.tumblr.com/post/179530330494/orom%C3%AB-and-nahar-so-ive-been-playing-around-with>. Now, I think the four arms are a bit much, but I love the combination of animal and human characteristics. I especially like it because ancient human religions often showed animal-headed gods. However, Nahar was reportedly the source of the mearas, who are normal-looking horses, so I’m not entirely sure whether the skull in his picture is real or a disguise or something that changed later. Maybe the Valar’s animals (is Nahar a Maia?) can change shape.
> 
> 8) I also love Wild Hunt stories. The Wild Hunt is often presented as something evil, but that seems to be a Christian view. I think that more than anything, it’s something DANGEROUS, and as we know from Lord of the Rings, many good things are extremely dangerous (elves, Fangorn forest, Gimli, etc.). Can you imagine being one of the first generations of Men seeing Orome riding past your hidden home in the middle of the night? Or an elf in Cuivenen who was told lies by Morgoth’s spies about who this great hunter was? The hunt would have been terrifying.
> 
> Beta by Xrai.


	4. #3: Songs and Horses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mallory would stay at Tom Bombadil’s house forever, if she could.

_**October 2-3** _

Mallory was surprised to find that she actually felt rested in the morning, despite her dreams. The sun shone in through the window, and she was ready to find out what was going to happen on her second day in Middle Earth.

“Come!” Goldberry called when she came out of her room, dressed in a clean outfit of green cloth that had appeared in her room that morning, almost a perfect match to the blue clothes from yesterday. “There is some food left for you. Tom is gone already, singing to the sun.”

Mallory sat down and ate. “What am I going to do today?” she asked. She didn’t want to leave yet. The hobbits had stayed for two nights here. Maybe she’d get to, too.

“You will help me, of course,” Goldberry said, as if it was obvious. So when Mallory finished eating, Goldberry showed her how she washed the dishes, and then they took her pajamas and clothes from yesterday to the river. Washing clothes, it turned out, was really difficult. They couldn’t use soap – it would be bad for the river, and even Maiar or whatever Goldberry was would have to make the soap, not just pull it out of thin air whenever she needed more – so they had to work twice as hard. Mallory was already tired by the time they hung them up to dry, but Goldberry wasn’t: she went back inside and cleaned the house, singing as she did.

She went on with her song until they were putting out food for lunch. Then, suddenly, she stopped and listened, looking delighted. From out the window, Mallory could faintly hear Tom Bombadil’s voice.

Mallory knew, intellectually, that some people had happy marriages. Her grandparents had been married for decades, although they didn’t always get along. And she’d watched movies and TV. But seeing two people who had a relationship that would literally last forever, and who truly loved each other all this time after they had first met, was strange. Also, sort of intimidating. This was an ideal no mortal could reach, especially not Mallory. She wasn’t opposed to getting married, but since she wasn't attracted to anyone, she didn’t expect it to ever happen. And even if it did, it was easily possible that her partner would get annoyed with her not feeling the same way they did and leave her.

Tom danced into the house, singing his song. Mallory had to smile at his ridiculousness. They ate lunch, which was similar to dinner the day before, but then again, what else did she expect them to eat? Mutton? Anyway, it wasn’t any less good.

“Well, now, what will we do next?” Tom asked once they were finished. “Come along! Put on boots! There are hills to climb and ponies to meet!”

Ponies? Mallory perked up at that. She’d always loved horses. For several years, once they had gotten a safe place to live, her grandparents had paid for her and Sandra to have one afterschool activity each as a Christmas present and a way of giving Mom money without saying that they were giving her money. Sandra had taken karate lessons, as if she’d already known that she was going to transition one day and might end up in danger because of it. (She hadn’t exactly sorted things out in her head at that age. She’d been playing make-believe games where she was Mallory's mother or the queen of a kingdom for years, swearing Mallory to secrecy, but she hadn’t even heard about the existence of transgender people at that age.) Mallory had done gymnastics for a couple of years, then karate because she wanted to be like Sandra, and then finally three years of horseback riding. She didn’t really know whether she’d been good or bad at it, except that she could never kick the school horses hard enough and wasn’t assertive enough to get the bit in a horse’s mouth without help, so she probably wasn’t all _that_ good. Still. She hadn’t had the chance to interact with horses at all since she’d quit at the end of seventh grade. She missed it.

But first… “Boots?” she asked.

It turned out that even more clothes had magically (more like _inexplicably_ – she needed to stop saying _magic_ sarcastically) appeared. Goldberry gave her a pair of socks that tied to her pants to keep them in place, then leather boots. They were difficult to put on, with laces that went almost all the way to her knee that first had to be loosened to let her foot in, then tightened to fit. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and she couldn’t exactly wear slippers or go barefoot on horseback. And they _were_ comfortable once they were laced up. They didn’t even need breaking in.

Tom took her outside and found a small herd of horses, all grazing and running around. Several were little ponies. Mallory looked at them curiously. “Frightened horses ran away from Bree-land,” Tom explained. “They found Fatty Lumpkin here, and they are happy now.” Then, he pointed out the tallest horse, chestnut-colored with white markings on his legs. “Years ago, swift-footed Kaza came, like them. He will take you on your journey.”

The horse looked up when he heard his name. He whinnied.

“Hi, Kaza,” she said, and he ran over eagerly. She petted his neck, and he nickered in appreciation. “You’re a pretty horse,” she told him. He nuzzled her shoulder.

As they put on his tack, Tom explained that Kaza had been a messenger’s horse, but when he lost his rider, he had the good sense (or so Tom said) to come here rather than try to find his way back home. He liked Tom better than any of his other masters, but he could run quickly, and he was used to carrying a rider on a long journey, and he had his own saddle and bridle, so he had volunteered (or so Tom said) to go with her.

“Where exactly am I going?” Mallory asked. Kaza obediently opened his mouth for the bit when he saw it coming, so that was off her list of worries. But it had been years since Mallory had mounted a horse. How did she hold the reins? She remembered some things – mount from the left, keep your heels down, pull on the reins to stop – but not all the details. “Shouldn’t you tell me my quest?”

“All will come in time,” he said, and she would have thought he was the wise old man mentor character if he didn’t look so silly and she hadn’t heard his songs. He could be Yoda, maybe. Yoda was silly sometimes, and he was even shorter than Tom. “Now, let’s ride away! Over hills and streams, but well away from barrows!”

Mallory shivered. No barrows. At least she could learn from the hobbits’ mistakes.

Time to mount. The stirrup was way up high. Mallory put her foot in it and tried to jump up to swing her right leg over, but she didn’t get anywhere close. Kaza was a lot bigger than the ponies she’d ridden in the past. Tom pointed to a block she could stand on, but she shook her head: what if there wasn’t a block for her later? She needed to be able to mount on her own. She bounced on the ground, getting ready, then jumped as hard as she could. There was a moment when she had to grab onto the saddle and fight to stay up while she pulled her leg the rest of the way over to the stirrup on Kaza’s right side, but she made it.

Okay, good, she didn’t need help to get up. Her foot found the stirrup, and she sat up straight, heels down. She hadn’t even thought about picking up the reins, but they were in her hands now and felt correct. Her body remembered, even if her mind didn’t.

Tom was sitting on his own pony – Fatty Lumpkin, presumably. The pony started to walk off, and Tom called out for her to follow.

Mallory knew that the school horses she’d ridden back in the day had only needed to be kicked because they were used to kids who had no idea what they were doing. It didn’t seem like Kaza would have that problem. So she squeezed her legs against his sides. He took one step, as if he weren’t sure what she wanted. She squeezed harder and said, “Walk,” still hesitant to kick him.

He lifted his head and walked quickly to catch up to Tom and the pony. She grinned, looking around from her new, higher vantage point. She was not only horseback riding again, but she was _trail_ _riding_ , which had always been presented as a special treat at lessons. Actually, this was even better than that. She was riding across the country like the girls in the horse books she read. She even had her own horse! She’d always dreamed of this.

They rode all afternoon. Mallory instinctively remembered how to lean back or forward depending on whether she was going up or down a hill. Trotting was more difficult: she got Kaza to start trotting easily enough, but she was jostled around a lot before she remembered the right way to move along with him. And she had almost completely forgotten how to get him to canter: Tom finally had to give her instructions.

At last, there was jumping. Jumping was even more rare than trail riding: Mallory had only done it a handful of times. She knew in principle what to do, that she was supposed to stand in her stirrups. But she didn’t remember when to signal Kaza to jump, resulting in a lot of him shying away from branches or splashing through streams and giving her deeply annoyed and reproachful looks. She imagined he was cursing himself for agreeing to carry this inexperienced idiot.

But then, finally, she got it, or he did, or both of them, and they flew over a trickling stream and landed lightly on the other side. She laughed, and Tom cheered.

She came home in the late afternoon, sweating and triumphant. She took off Kaza’s tack and brushed and fed him with Tom’s advice. There was something odd about his hooves when she went to check them for stones (she wasn’t at all confident that she’d recognize one if she saw it, but she remembered that she was supposed to do that), and she stared long enough that he got annoyed at having to hold up his foot for her. Putting it back down, she realized that he wasn’t wearing horseshoes. She’d probably never seen a horse without them before. Maybe he didn’t like them. He could apparently ask for what he wanted, after all.

Tom stayed outside to care of all the horses and ponies, and she went in. Goldberry greeted her with a hug and sent her to have a bath before dinner like she had last night. Mallory was amazed again at the sense of family, and how quickly she had been accepted into it. She wondered how long they had been waiting for her. But still, she didn’t feel like they were doing this because they had to. They actually _did_ like her.

Her hair was an absolute disaster, so she had to spend quite a while picking through it before she went out to eat. The dinner food was the same again, but she wasn’t getting bored. She found herself talking about holidays, and then singing Christmas songs, even though it wasn’t the Christmas season in either of their timelines. She was a good singer, supposedly, though she could never manage to do it except for Mom and Sandra, or as part of a chorus. But she wasn’t scared to do anything here.

Mallory’s legs were already sore by the time they were finished eating. Horseback riding was a difficult sport to go back to after a break. She sat by the fire, first stretching her muscles and then reading the appendices of the book again. She wasn’t the best at studying. This was, ironically enough, because she was too good at taking notes: she always just remembered what she’d written. But summarizing a book or lecture wasn’t the same as memorizing dates. Even her history classes didn’t usually require that. This was going to take effort.

Eventually, she got too tired and went to bed, wearing her newly dry pajamas. She fell asleep quickly and stayed that way – no visions tonight. But when she woke up early the next morning, she found that she could barely stand up. Not moving all night had magnified her sore muscles several times over. There was no way she could get on a horse. She stiffly and painfully made her way to the dining room. “Mallory’s legs are sore?” Tom asked. “Better now than later!”

Yes, it was definitely better to wake up to this now than somewhere in the wild. She could stay here safely for a few days. Heck, they _had_ to let her stay now.

Goldberry gave her hot cloths to put over her legs. After a while, she took her to wash her clothes from yesterday, then sent her out to stretch her legs by helping Tom with the animals. He went back and forth between telling her what to do, singing songs, and having conversations with the animals themselves, which Mallory would have laughed at except that she was pretty sure they understood him. "Thank you," she said to the little herd of sheep, who she figured were responsible for fetching Tom and saving her and her book. One of them looked at her with a bright eye, but the rest seemed more interested in the salt lick and other treats.

Finally, they went back inside, and she could ask him questions that didn’t have to do with types of animal feed. “Where am I going?” she asked. “I know I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t sent to do something, right? And you said I wouldn’t go home until I’d done it.”

“You must go to Bree first of all, then on to Rivendell,” Tom answered. “Every quest travels to Rivendell in this age, so I hear.”

He looked at her with a glint in his eye, almost like it was a joke. Of course, she already knew that quests had to pass through Elrond’s house. If she’d ever written a story about a Middle Earth quest, she would have sent her character there. And it didn’t seem such a bad destination. But Rivendell would only be a waystation: it always was. And she didn’t feel good about getting confirmation that she actually had to leave. She liked being here, with Tom and Goldberry. She was happier here than she had been in years. She was _living_ here, not just surviving.

“I wish I could stay with you,” she said.

“Wishes cannot _all_ come true,” he replied. “Tom is only here to guide you.”

“Then why do I have to go there?” she asked.

“Tom’s friend visits Rivendell often,” he said. “Gray is his cloak, and gray his hat, and he travels far. You would call him Gandalf.”

“Yes,” she said. “Gandalf. He’ll be there soon. The seventeenth, I think.” She tried to remember what the book had said.

“Good!” said Tom. “Will you bring a message to him from me?”

That was it? A message? He could have sent that with the hobbits. Or would the message tell him where to send her next? Was this a scavenger hunt? God, she hoped not.

“I guess so. But how will I find Rivendell? Isn’t it supposed to be secret and hidden?”

“Follow the Road through Bree, over rivers and hills,” he said. “Guards will watch the Ford when Riders are abroad. Iarwain Ben-Adar, they call me: tell them I sent you there.”

He made her repeat it: Iarwain Ben-Adar, his Sindarin name, meaning Eldest and Fatherless. He was sure that they would recognize it. Mallory wasn’t.

“But what about the Black Riders?” she asked. “Or the hobbits, even? I couldn’t even stand up to a group of badgers!”

His smile vanished. “Tom is not the master of riders from the East,” he said. “Trust in Kaza! Do not fear while you are on his back!”

She sighed. Maybe if her legs were still sore tomorrow, she could stay another day.

But she couldn’t keep the dread in her mind. It was lunchtime, and she loved the food as much as she ever had. Then – since her muscles were sore all over again from sitting at the table – she sat on the floor and stretched them out while Goldberry sang and Tom told her stories of the wider land he had once roamed, of water-spirits and walking trees, of Elves passing westward and wizards passing east. And at last, he came to modern day and the messages that had come to him from elves and animals and trees. He had heard of Gandalf’s capture and escape through the eagles, which was how he could guess where he was going to be. Mallory began to understand that things were happening that the books had barely even touched, and she had a sinking feeling that those events she knew nothing about was exactly what she’d have to deal with.

At last, he told her the message she had to bring to Gandalf. He said it in another language, like he had been talking when she first met him, foreign words that somehow shifted into something she understood. “Elves do not speak English,” he explained. “Wizards do not, either. You will say it this way and they will understand.”

Oh, no. That was bad. Worse than black riders, really. Just because she didn’t like to talk didn’t mean that she didn’t want to have the option, and she _definitely_ wanted to know what people were saying.

So Tom taught her the words, sound by sound, until she could say it all the way through on her own and get the bizarre experience of hearing it turn into meaningful words as it came out of her mouth. So now she had more to memorize. Not just the appendices, but his name and the message, too. But it wasn’t like studying facts for class: it was important. So she had no choice but to remember.

At last, Goldberry took her to her bedroom again, wishing her a good sleep. Was it unfair to Mom and Sandra that she wished Goldberry could be her mother? That she wished she could have grown up here (with internet access, of course)? Maybe Sandra could even have lived here with her. But she knew that it wasn’t good for a mortal to spend too long in places like this house. She’d read enough fantasy and fairy tales to understand that.

Then again, this whole world was a magic world. Was all of it going to be bad for her?

She fell asleep thinking about it. At least, she thought she did. But somehow, she found herself outside, standing on a hill, looking out to another hill in the distance, where there were irregular flashes of light.

It was October 3, she remembered, or at least by the Shire calendar it was. Gandalf had fought the Ringwraiths that night on Weathertop. Frodo had seen it from a distance, and now she was seeing it, too.

She shivered, and fell asleep, and woke up safe and warm in Tom’s house in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) I don’t know what the deal is with OCs who don’t know how to ride horses. I even read a story where Lothíriel didn’t know how to ride, and she grew up in Middle Earth! Come on! I know how to ride a horse and I grew up in a modern city! I only took lessons for two years, but something like ten years later, I got to ride a horse for a few minutes, and the basics came back to me immediately.
> 
> 2) The name “Kaza” doesn’t mean anything. Actually, we don’t actually know much about Westron, because Tolkien translated all the non-Elvish names and words in his books into something that would sound familiar to us. But he listed the “real” version of a few hobbit and Breeland names. We know that in Real!Westron, masculine names tend to end in -a, and looking through the list of the few Real!Westron names we know, I noticed k and z show up a lot, so I came up with Kaza. (By the way, you know all the genderswap fics that have a female Bilbo called Bilba? That is his actual, literal, real, Real!Westron name that Frodo and Gandalf and everyone else would have actually called him, and I can’t handle this.)
> 
> 3) By the way, one of those questions everyone has an opinion on: what type of being is Tom Bombadil? I’ve narrowed it down to three options: one of the Ainur who is not counted among the Valar or Maiar, a manifestation of untouched nature, or something unique in the world that Eru invented just because he felt like it (the Silmarillion says that He does this). The best explanation I’ve heard for Goldberry is that she’s the spirit of water-lilies, but I’m not sure if she’s a Maia or just a nature spirit.
> 
> Beta by Xrai


	5. 4: The Gates of Bree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mallory attracts attention at Bree.

October 4

It was a bright morning when Mallory woke up. The grass out the window was very green, and the sky was very blue. But her legs ached, and she felt nervous in the pit of her stomach.

Tom and Goldberry were very cheerful at breakfast. At first, she tried not to mention leaving, in case she could put it off another day. But then, Tom asked her why she was unhappy.

“Do I really have to go?” she asked. “I love it here.”

Goldberry was the one to answer. “You will find many places to love,” she said. “And many people. But you will always be welcome here.”

That wasn’t enough of a comfort. Mallory ate slowly, savoring the food. Then, they started getting ready.

Goldberry combed her hair for her (there were no hairbrushes, only combs) and pulled it into tight braids: parted down the middle, a French braid on each side, and the ends of the braids wrapped up into a bun on the back. She secured it with something more or less like bobby pins. Meanwhile, Tom produced some belongings of Kaza’s former rider: saddlebags and a dagger in a leather sheath. He gave her a long, leather belt to hang the dagger on, along with a small folding knife and a bag of Shire-coins that he said would be accepted at Bree. Mallory didn’t mind the knife so much – she had a pocketknife at home that she’d loved when she was little – but she was very nervous about the dagger. She drew it carefully, seeing that it was clean and sharp, and put it away quickly.

She took a deep breath. She couldn’t treat the dagger like that. She would have to know how to hold it, even if she just pulled it out to threaten people. So once she had her belt wrapped around her waist, she tried drawing it and putting it back a few times. She hoped she would never have to do it for real.

Goldberry packed one of her saddle bags with food – enough for today, and some bread for later. She would have to buy more at Bree. There was a bag of grain for Kaza, too, but only for days when he couldn’t find grass. In her other bag went the outfit Mallory wasn’t wearing. “What do you want to do with these?” she asked, holding up Mallory’s pajamas.

Mallory considered. Those would attract attention. The cloth and the bright colors on them weren’t the kind of thing she expected to see in Middle Earth, and the people here definitely didn’t have elastic waistbands or plastic buttons. And it wasn’t like she was going to wear the pajamas on the road. “I guess I’m going to have to leave them here,” she said. If she did, it was sort of a promise to return.

Goldberry nodded. “I will keep them for you.”

Tom picked up her book. “This will bring you danger,” he said. “Keep it hidden now.”

Danger. Yes. She remembered how every evil thing in the world seemed to be attracted to Frodo. But this wasn’t the One Ring, and the Ringwraiths weren’t looking for it. The badgers had seemed to want to destroy it, not keep it for themselves. Of course, she didn’t want it destroyed, either. She looked at the tooth marks again.

Goldberry took out some cloth and wrapped it carefully, making sure to tuck in the corners so it was secure. Then, she put it in Mallory’s saddle bag with her clothes. She also gave Mallory a dark green cloak, a rolled-up blanket, and two leather bags for water.

“How am I going to get more drinking water?” Mallory asked. “I’m used to treated water. I’m sure your water is clean. But out there…”

“Look for clear, swift-running streams,” Goldberry replied. “Drink from those. I will give you a cloth to filter out any dirt.”

Mallory nodded, and she went off and came back with a small piece of finely woven cloth. She looked at it doubtfully, but then again, anything that Goldberry River-Daughter gave her that had to do with water was probably going to work. She should trust it, she thought.

At last, she had everything she needed, and there was no way to avoid the inevitable. “You’ll come with me, right?” she asked Tom. “I mean, not to Bree, but to the Road. Past the Barrow-downs, anyway.”

Tom gave her a long look. Mallory felt like this was somehow a failing on her part. But what was the point of the books if she didn’t know what to avoid?

“Please?” she said.

“I will take you to the Road,” he agreed. “And Fatty Lumpkin with me.”

Mallory breathed in relief. Goldberry came up to her. Mallory hugged her, eyes stinging. “Farewell,” Goldberry said. “Have courage, and may you find many others to help you on your way. I will be here if you choose to return.”

 _Not so much an issue of choosing_ , she thought. She would definitely come back if she could.

And then, it was time to go. Mallory stepped on a rock to give herself a leg up. She had been sore when she woke up, but it was much worse once she was sitting on a horse and using the same muscles again. This was going to be a long ride.

Tom, on the other hand, was bright and cheerful as always, singing nonsense, _Hey dol derry dol_ and so on. Mallory started to lighten up. It was genuinely a beautiful day. It was warm, though: her clothes were light, but it was too hot for her to wear her cloak. She worried that the part in her hair would get sunburned. Then again, it was autumn in an area around the latitude of England, so the sun couldn’t be _that_ bad. She also kept an eye out for standing stones as they rode. If she’d seen them on Earth, she would have been thrilled to explore them: she’d always wanted to visit places like that in real life. But here, they meant barrow-wights. She did not go near them.

They ate lunch on the grass near a stream, leaving the horse and pony to graze. It was so pleasant that Mallory almost forgot to be upset. Afterwards, she went to the bathroom behind a tree and washed her hands as well as she could in the stream, and they mounted again.

Mallory hadn’t realized how far it was to Bree. It had been two days for the hobbits, but that was the barrow-wights’ fault, and she had thought it would take her less than a full day of riding. But as the shadows got longer and longer, she started to worry. It was going to be night when she got there, same as it had been for the hobbits. She ended up hoping to see the Road as she crested each hill, even though she still dreaded it, because she was worried about how late it would be when it finally came.

At last, she came to the top of a hill and found herself looking down at a dirt track below her. That was the famous Road? Really? It looked terrible. Nobody was maintaining it. But then again, she was on a horse, not a car or cart or anything with wheels. Kaza would be fine.

“Now I will say farewell,” Tom said. “Kaza will help you now, but Tom must return home. The sky grows dark, and Goldberry is waiting.”

Mallory’s eyes burned. “Good-bye,” she said. “Thank you.”

Tom didn’t draw out the farewells. He turned away, singing, as she led Kaza down to the Road.

Now, the real adventure started. Only it didn’t, because Bree was nowhere in sight. Not then, not in the next ten minutes, not in the next hour. By the time she saw the town nestled in the sunlit side of a tall hill, the sky was turning orange with sunset. She was surprised at the location: she hadn’t realized it was on a hillside at all. But it had to be Bree.

She rode up to the gate. Kaza walked slowly, and she didn’t push him to hurry up. Her stomach was doing funny things out of anxiety. She was torn between worrying about how she was going to get around Bree and worrying about arriving after dark, and she couldn’t decide which was scarier.

As she approached, a face looked out at her from the guard-house. “You’re a woman!” he said in surprise when she came closer. She had a moment’s relief at the fact that she understood him. His speech was doing that thing where she understood it the moment after she heard it, but she had expected that to happen. She understood him, and that was what mattered. “Where’s the rest of your party? The men?”

“They – I don’t have any,” she said, feeling awkward. Of course the people at Bree were going to be sexist. Everyone was probably going to be. Why would the Valar or Eru whoever had been in charge of bringing her here choose to bring a girl? A _teenaged_ girl? There were enough adult men who liked _The Lord of the Rings_ to pick from.

But she didn’t expect the reaction she got from him. He looked confused for a moment, then suspicious. “Do you speak Westron?”

She froze, her eyes wide and heart racing. Had he – had he not understood her? Had Tom Bombadil not given her the ability to talk to other people? Was the translation only going one way? Her fingers tightened around the reins. No, no, _no_ …

Then again, wouldn’t it be just as bad if it _was_ going both ways? He was going to hear her at that slight delay, and he’d hear words that were different from what they meant to him. He’d notice that, and she wouldn’t be able to explain it, even if he did know what she was saying. It was going to be a lot better if she kept her mouth shut.

He frowned. “Westron? You speak Westron?”

She realized he’d read her freeze as meaning that she didn’t understand him. She nodded quickly.

“Are you lost?”

She shook her head.

“Good, because I’m not going to go out looking for them for you,” he said, his frown deepening. “I thought even rangers had the decency to take care of their women.”

So she was a ranger now, was she? Was that good or bad?

“There certainly have been odd folk about,” he said. “Are you going to need help finding the inn?”

She shook her head. She found herself disliking him. What was his name again? She mostly remembered him being ridden down by the Nazgûl in one of the over-dramatic movie scenes.

“Go on, then. You’d better get somewhere before dark. Your clothes don’t do much to hide…” He looked her over. “Your femininity.”

Oh, now they were at _that_ point. At school, she might have given him the finger behind his back (the person it was targeted at hardly ever noticed, but it felt good, and the only time she’d been told on, the teacher had refused to believe it because she was the best behaved kid in class), but it was better not to mess around here. So she just nudged Kaza on through the gates.

She felt very strange. Was she supposed to dismount now that she was in town? No, probably not, and the cobblestone street looked perilous. But being up on a horse made her feel like she stood out. She was being stared at. She wished she’d worn her cloak to hide her face and her clothes. A subtle glance around told her that all the women were wearing dresses.

It was harder to be subtle when she saw her first hobbit. She was an older woman with nut-brown skin, curly gray hair and the size and proportions of a ten-year-old. Mallory couldn’t resist looking down at her feet, but she could barely see her toes under her skirt, and the woman frowned at her.

At last, after a surprisingly long ride (well, it would be: a walking horse was much slower than a car), Mallory spotted a three-story building with a hanging sign that showed a white horse rearing up. It was the first place she had seen with a picture of a horse, and she remembered that English pubs traditionally had signs that represented their names since so many people hadn’t been able to read in the old days. There were letters over the door, but they jumped and shifted as she looked at them: first moving around, then changing into the Latin alphabet, then back to the original, and never making any sense for long enough for her to actually read them. So Tom hadn’t given her the ability to talk _or_ the ability to read. Not super helpful. Then again, maybe he hadn’t meant to give her this ability at all. Maybe it was just left over from when she’d been talking to him. In that case, something was better than nothing.

So how was she going to do this? She didn’t even know how to ask for a hotel room in America, speaking English. She couldn’t even take sick notes up to the office most of the time. Now, she, a woman in an openly sexist society and who couldn’t speak a word of the language here, had to try to survive the night and buy food for a long journey. And there wasn’t the option of just putting it off and coming back tomorrow. She _had_ to do it.

After several long and painful minutes of trying to work up her nerve, Mallory was rescued by a boy – no, a young hobbit man – coming from the yard. Up close, Mallory could see his feet: hairy but not as strange-looking as she would have thought. She was surprised, however, to see slightly pointed ear tips poking out of his curly hair. So hobbit ears were pointed? She had always thought that Peter Jackson made that up. Not that the ears looked like the movie ears, but it was still a surprise.

“Good evening, miss,” he said. “You’ll be wanting Mr. Butterbur?”

She nodded.

“Certainly, miss.” He jogged inside, calling for Butterbur. A moment later, he returned with a round, balding man. Butterbur, of course. She had actually imagined what he looked like when she was reading the book. This wasn’t quite the same as what she’d come up with, but it was pretty close.

“Hullo!” Butterbur said. “What are you doing here? Looking for someone?”

She shook her head.

He glanced around as if he thought someone was hiding in the yard somewhere. “Are you alone?”

She nodded.

“Well! There have been unusual goings-on lately! Disappearing hobbits going off with rangers, and black men asking questions, and stolen horses – or run away, more like – and now you! Don’t suppose you know Strider, do you?”

She shook her head, which was true.

“That’s not his true name, of course, but there aren’t any rangers here tonight, or any _other_ rangers, I should say. I suppose you’ll want to sleep here? Do you have any money?”

She nodded and put her hand on her pouch of coins.

“All right! Better not show it here. Bob, take the horse, and tell Nob I’ll need a room for Miss… what was your name again?”

That sounded like a bad idea. Mallory shook her head.

Butterbur frowned. “Don’t know what cause you rangers have to be so secretive. Anyway, a room for her and her horse, provided she has enough money.” He turned back to her. “If you don’t, mind you, it won’t be any trouble to find someone who can pay full price. We’re full every night these days. If you weren’t a woman, you’d have to share a room.”

Well, maybe sexism was _occasionally_ helpful. She dismounted, and Butterbur took her inside. It was a good thing she hadn’t gone in alone, because she was immediately aware of people watching her, and it was better when there was someone between them and her. A woman’s head even poked out from the kitchen when she passed it. Fortunately, Butterbur took her past the crowded common room to what seemed to be a sort of front desk. She took a deep breath, trying to calm her anxiety.

“Well, let’s see it,” said Butterbur.

Mallory nodded. She’d looked at her coins already and found that they were a mixture of silver and what she assumed was copper or bronze or something cheaper. She really had no idea how much any of it was worth, and clearly Tom didn’t have any concept of the value of money. If she’d had a gold coin, she would have given that to Butterbur, but she didn’t. She hunted for silver coins, offering them to him one at a time as she sorted through the bag.

“That’ll do,” he said when she had enough. “I don’t often see men with this currency. I hope you came by it honestly.”

 _Men?_ She was confused for a moment, then realized that he had said “Men”, not “men”. There was a difference, and she was going to have to figure out how to recognize it without the benefit of seeing a capital letter. Not the sort of inconvenience she’d expected to have to deal with here.

But now, the situation was over. She’d survived her first transaction in Middle Earth, and now she had herself a bed for the night. All she had to do now was process the culture shock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Sorry for the awkward ending to this. I’m trying to keep the chapters under 4,500 words, and this one was just too long.
> 
> 2) Mallory’s hairstyle is supposed to look something like this:  
> [http://pinhairstyles.com/11-elegant-french-braid-bun-hairstyles-2017/8/ ](http://pinhairstyles.com/11-elegant-french-braid-bun-hairstyles-2017/8/)
> 
> 3) It’s said somewhere (not sure where) that the Dúnedain live in the Angle near Rivendell, and most stories go with that. But occasionally, someone points out that there must also be families who go wandering (e.g. “No Man’s Child” <https://archiveofourown.org/works/3862788/chapters/8628942>). I think this is probably right, because the Bree-folk talk about them as a wandering PEOPLE, not some wandering MEN. The Bree-folk also think that the Dúnedain don’t have any permanent home. If all they saw were warriors, no mothers or children or older people, they would assume that the rangers go home to their families somewhere, otherwise where would new rangers come from? There might be both stationary Dúnedain in the Angle and also family groups who travel together, and so people have seen female rangers (both warriors and civilians) before.
> 
> 4) I used “odd” where Tolkien would have used “queer”. Mallory doesn’t have Tolkien himself in her head. (There’s a story hook for you.) The translation thingy hunts for a word in her head that is as close as possible to whatever was said. Since “queer” to her means “not heterosexual”, it wouldn’t choose that as a translation for any words that mean “odd” or “unusual”.
> 
> 5) One of the things I’m trying to do in this fic is find pieces of fanon and movie canon that are either baseless or outright incorrect and change them to screw with everyone (including me). Whatever way you imagine Middle Earth would never end up being what it’s actually like. Also, it’s fun to throw fanon out the window. For example, I’ve done some reading, and it seems to be clear that the majority of hobbits and possibly also the Men of Bree have “brown” skin. At this point, I want ANYTHING that will give me light-side characters with dark skin, so I’m taking that bit of possible canon. There aren’t going to be many black people in this story, though, because we’re not going far south. If I ever get to Gondor…
> 
> 6) The problem I had was hobbit ears. I, too, fully believed that pointed hobbit ears was a Peter Jackson invention. I was absolutely stunned when I found out that not only did Tolkien say they were pointed, but he actually DREW them that way. (ex: <https://middle-earth.xenite.org/do-tolkiens-elves-have-pointy-ears/> and <https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/09/22/j-r-r-tolkiens-illustrations-for-the-hobbit-slideshow/>) So if I went into Middle Earth and saw hobbits with pointed ears, I’d be confused. But if Mallory, who grew up on the movies, saw hobbits with pointed ears, wouldn’t that seem normal to her? I’m still not sure I made the right choice here. That said, I hate backwards-pointing ears, curling ears, ridiculously elongated ears, etc. Just draw your pointed ears like Tolkien did!
> 
> Beta by Xrai
> 
> P.S. I'm having a terrible week. Make it better by commenting.


	6. 5: Ivy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mallory finds unexpected help at the Prancing Pony.

_**October 4** _

A dark-haired hobbit, Nob, took Mallory upstairs to a small room. It had a bed, a basin for washing, and a small table. “I’ll bring you food, miss,” said Nob. “Do you want your bags, too?”

Mallory nodded and sat down. Could she get herself a bath? She felt dirty after a day of riding. She was going to have to get used to it, though, because she had a lot more than one day ahead of her. For now, she just washed her hands and face with a cloth, unwilling to actually stick her hands in the bowl of water.

When Nob came back with her saddle bags, he was followed by a girl carrying table settings. She was somewhere around Mallory’s age, with brown hair, tan skin, and a white apron over her brown dress. She curtsied slightly and looked at Mallory with a seemingly excited smile, but she waited until Nob had left to say anything.

“I’m Ivy, miss,” she said when the door closed. “I hope you don’t mind, but I had to come meet you – a woman traveling all by yourself! I’ve seen women traveling together sometimes, but usually there’s men with them, or sometimes men alone, like that Strider. You must be terribly brave to go around on your own!”

_Brave?_ Mallory wondered. She wasn’t even sure she was brave enough for this conversation, let alone traveling!

“Do you have a sword?” she went on, undeterred by the you-must-be-nuts look Mallory was giving her. “Or a bow?”

Mallory shook her head.

Ivy looked disappointed. “I hope nothing terrible happened? Your companions didn’t die?”

Mallory shook her head again.

“Oh, good. Well, I’d better go fetch your food. You won’t want to go down with the company. The Bree-folk are all right – at least, my Mum, she’s the cook, knows their mothers and wives, so she’ll straighten them out – but you can’t be sure of the southerners. Not all of them brought their women with them, at least not the ones who come to the inn, and they don’t all have manners, you know? Mr. Butterbur will throw them out if I complain, but it’s easier just to stay away. What do you want to drink? The water is clean here, but I can get you some ale if you want, or mix them together, or maybe tea?”

Mallory shook her head, then nodded. Ivy was going to get exhausting very quickly. She was so excited. Mallory couldn’t imagine someone being so excited to meet _her_.

“What? Tea?”

Mallory nodded in confirmation.

“I’ll bring it. Do you want a bath? You look clean enough, but a hot bath is nicer than a river.”

Mallory nodded again.

“That’s going to take a while, but I’ll do it while you’re eating. What else? Oh, there’s a chamber pot under your bed. You can use it if you don’t want to go out to the privy. I’ll empty it for you once I get your meal sorted.”

Mallory went and looked under the bed. There was a strange-looking bowl sort of thing with a handle. She looked at Ivy.

“Yes, that. Use it and I’ll take care of it for you. You know what it is, right? You use it instead of a latrine? I’m sure you’ve been in towns before, just because I don’t recognize you doesn’t mean… I’m sorry for talking so much. Mr. Butterbur must be rubbing off on me! It’s just, you’re very interesting. Even more than the other guests – I’ll tell you about them later, if you want. I’ll go get your food now.”

She ran off. Well, at least Mallory wouldn’t have to ask any questions, the way she talked. And being a ranger gave her an excuse not to know things that any normal Bree-lander would know. She used the chamber pot, feeling very self-conscious about it, and washed her hands again.

Ivy came back with an entire pot of tea and plenty of food: shepherd’s pie, a wedge of cheese, bread, butter, and berries. Mallory was impressed they’d give all that to a “ranger” that Butterbur clearly didn’t trust. Her money must have been good. As she set it out, Ivy told her all about how a hobbit from the Shire had disappeared right in front of the eyes of the entire company, and then the horses had disappeared that night (but not stolen, don’t worry, they’re turning up in the other towns, and that nasty southerner left, so it probably wouldn’t happen again anyway), and then the hobbits went with Strider, who always travels alone and never with friends, headed down a road that only rangers or dwarves ever used! Oh, and there were strange “black” men asking questions, but she hadn’t seen them herself. She hadn’t actually seen the disappearing, either, she admitted, but everyone had been talking about it.

Mallory finally sat down to eat as Ivy went to take away the chamber pot. She was relieved by the quiet. The shepherd’s pie was much better than the kind they served at school, which she had never liked. (Fortunately, she packed her own lunch these days, so food she didn’t like wasn’t a problem anymore. Or, more accurately, she _had_ been packing her own lunch, back when she’d still been in her own time.)

Ivy came back a few minutes later. “Mum says to leave you alone,” she informed her. “I think she’s afraid I’ll run away with you. And I know what people say about rangers, if you don’t mind me calling you that, and they’re probably right, but I wish I could go off on my own sometimes and not have to do what people tell me.”

Suddenly, Mallory understood. Ivy looked up to her. She _envied_ her. Of course she did! A woman rides into town on her own horse in pants and a shirt with no men to be seen and gets her own room at the inn with her own money. That was clearly the kind of thing that never happened, even with the female rangers people kept referring to. Mallory was a modern woman in medieval times, and she acted like it.

“Why _don’t_ you have a sword, by the way? It seems like that would be a good idea. And it would be even more impressive.”

Mallory sighed. There was the inevitable question that required her to speak to answer it.

“I’m sorry. Mum’s right. I’m bothering you. But I have so many questions! Like where are you going? And what’s your name? And why do you have those jewels in your ears – don’t they hurt?”

She looked expectant, but Mallory just shook her head at the earrings question, twisting them self-consciously.

Ivy sighed at her lack of response. “All right, I’ll start working on your bath. Ring the bell if you need anything. Nob might come, but you can always ask for me if you need me.”

That was nice of her to say, but Mallory actually couldn’t ask for her, because she had no idea what _ivy_ was in Westron. Good thing Kaza didn’t have a word-name.

Mallory had the rest of her meal while Ivy went up and down with water buckets. She ate as much as she could manage, because she knew she wouldn’t have meals like this on the road to Rivendell, and besides, she wanted to get what she’d paid for. At least she could be fairly confident that the food wouldn’t go in the trash if she didn’t finish it. Or would it? There was no refrigerator. Surely there were pigs or something that would eat it. This was a medieval town, after all.

By the time she was done, the bath was ready, so she bolted the door and undressed. The bathtub barely fit with the table and the bed, and there was really no room to walk around, and she had to be very careful getting in. The water was comfortably warm, though the soap was pretty terrible. She didn’t get her hair wet. In fact, she didn’t even take it out of the braids. All she had was a comb, and comparing how tangled it had gotten the first day she’d ridden with Tom to how well the braids had stayed in today, she didn’t want to risk touching it. She’d see if she could keep the hairstyle in overnight. She knew it wouldn’t kill her to go a few days without washing it, and it wasn’t as if she was going to school where people would judge her. Nobody would be around at all, once she left Bree.

Her clothes were a problem, too. She wasn’t even going to be able to clean the ones she’d worn today. Of course, one day’s worth of wearing clothes was probably going to be the least of her worries once she was on her way to Rivendell. It had taken the hobbits three weeks to get there. She’d have to wear her clothes ten days each. Normally, she wouldn’t even do that when she _wasn’t_ riding all day and sleeping on the ground at night, let alone when she _was_.

Finally, Ivy came and cleaned up, informing her that people were talking about her in the common room, which Mallory would rather have not known. But once the bathtub was out of the room and the table folded up and put in a corner, there was nothing to do but to go to bed. Mallory had no real idea what time it was and whether she was early or late. She bolted the door again, took off her outer clothes, and lay down. The bed was good enough quality, but not as comfortable as the one she’d slept in with Tom and Goldberry. Of course not. This wasn’t a magic house.

She didn’t have anything to do. It felt wrong to unwrap the book, and she didn’t entirely trust the candle not to throw a spark her way. So she blew out the candle, leaving the room pitch black. She lay down, closed her eyes, and practiced the things she needed to know – the dates from the Appendix, Tom’s name, the message – until she fell asleep.

* * *

**_October 5_ **

Mallory slept restlessly that night. She could hear clattering dishes and other noises from below her, and she was in an unfamiliar bed. She kept having strange dreams, too: Sandra thanking her for running away because it had been so interesting to search for her, flashes of light on the mountain that blended into scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies, and a very confused version of the Wild Hunt dream. Sometime in the night, she woke up and found that she couldn’t breathe through her nose. The room must have been dusty. She didn’t have any allergy medicine, of course, and it was too dark to go looking for the handkerchief Goldberry had given her in order to try to clear her nose. She slept even worse after that.

When it started to get light, she got up, painfully, to get the handkerchief. Her legs were almost as sore today as the morning after her first day riding. Meanwhile, her nose was still stuffy, and her eyes had started itching. Back home, over-the-counter medications would take care of both the allergies and the pain within a half hour. Here, she was stuck with it. She tried to stretch her legs out, then went to the bathroom (so to speak) and got dressed.

Mallory was trying to get up the courage to ring the bell when Ivy knocked on the door with clean water for washing. Rescued from social anxiety again. Ivy looked just as excited as she had last night, though she didn’t talk quite as fast. “I’ll bring up breakfast,” she said. She looked closely at Mallory, who was breathing through her mouth, and at the handkerchief in her hand. “Is it dust? I guess you don’t get that out on the road, or not the same kind of dust, anyway. Good thing you like tea. Mum might even have something she can put in it to help.”

She disappeared with the old water and leftover tea from dinner. She came back a few minutes later with Nob, carrying another pot of tea and a tray of food. There was sausage, ham, warm bread, and fried eggs. It smelled amazing. _Last good meal I’ll have for weeks,_ Mallory thought sadly. She sat down and poured herself some of the tea. The steam would help, if nothing else.

Unsurprisingly, Ivy stayed after Nob went back down. “We heard from one of the gatekeepers this morning,” she said.

Mallory looked at her, worried, but she was still smiling, so it couldn’t be anything too bad.

“He said you came through the West gate, which I suppose makes sense, with the Shire-coin. But he also… he thinks you’re… well… _touched_ , if you know what I mean.”

She meant crazy, didn’t she?

“He says you can’t talk, or you can, but it comes out like gibberish.”

Mallory felt her face getting hot. Looking back, she wished she had never said anything to him at all. But then she wouldn’t know what the situation was with Westron and English.

“And you never talked last night - I mean, I didn’t really give you a chance, did I? But is it true? Can you say something so I can hear?”

Uh-oh. Now she was a curiosity. But even though she didn’t like it, it was probably a good idea to try it again and see whether the lack of translation was a fluke. What should she say? Ivy would probably remember it forever, considering the way she idolized her. Too much pressure. She blanked out.

“ _I_ don’t think anything is wrong with you, of course. And even Mr. Butterbur said you were perfectly polite, and you had no cause to speak to men, anyhow. That’s when they called me over to see if you’d said anything to me. _I_ think you went through that forest by the Shire. They say there’s all sorts of unnatural things there. Or the Downs, where all the tombs are. Did you get a spell put on you?”

That was quite a leap from “can’t speak Westron,” but Ivy seemed to be a Middle Earth version of a fantasy nerd. Only, for her, there was actually a chance of the stories she dreamed of actually coming true. And here was a heroine riding through town on a quest! How perfect was that? The weird part was, of course, that Ivy wasn’t wrong. Tom and Goldberry were about as natural as anything, but the barrow-downs weren’t, and Mallory wasn’t sure about Old Man Willow or the badgers. And she _had_ gotten a spell put on her, if that was the word she wanted to use. It just went the opposite way of what Ivy was thinking: creating sense out of words, not nonsense.

“Or are _you_ something – I mean, you’re not a faerie, I’ve never seen one, they don’t come through here anymore, but Mum has, and she says they’re taller than rangers and more beautiful than anyone you’ve ever seen, not to be impolite – but are you something _magic_?”

Mallory had to smile at that. It felt like a little kid asking her if she was _really_ a witch at Halloween. But Ivy was entirely serious about the question. It was entirely possible, from her point of view, that Mallory was actually a… well, not _faerie_ , that meant _elf_ , but some magical being, like Goldberry. But she shook her head in response.

“Then did you get a spell put on you?” Ivy seemed even more excited at that idea. “Did you go through the forest?”

Mallory nodded. Ivy clearly wasn’t going to let her go anytime soon, and cold eggs were no good, so she started eating.

“And a spell?”

She nodded.

“I knew it! But don’t tell anyone else. People don’t like magic around here. Are you looking for a way to get it taken off you? You know, break the spell?”

Mallory shook her head, though she knew Ivy wouldn’t understand.

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “Can you say something to me? Please?”

Mallory had to forget about saying anything interesting and just get this out of the way. “Hi, my name is Mallory. What’s yours?” she asked.

Ivy’s eyes widened. “That – well, it sounded like some foreign tongue, to tell you the truth. But you were just talking like normal?”

Mallory nodded.

“Well!” she said. “I suppose it’s a good thing I’m talking so much, to make up for it! I’d better go downstairs, though, before Mum yells at me.”

Mallory put her hand out to stop her. She hadn’t planned out how she was going to get more food, but Ivy wanted to help her and knew she couldn’t talk, so this was the perfect opportunity.

“What is it?” Ivy asked. “Do you need something?”

Mallory went to her bags and pulled out yesterday’s bread, showing it and the empty food wrappings to her.

“You already have food,” she said, sounding confused. “Oh! You’ll need more, of course. I should have thought of that. It’s an awfully long way from here to anywhere but the Shire. Do you have any money left?”

Mallory nodded and showed her the money pouch.

“I can go talk to Mum. She has almost everything, and she knows where to get what she doesn’t. And you can’t exactly haggle with this spell on you! Do you want me to take the money and buy you food, or do you want to come and keep an eye on it?”

Mallory held out the bag for her. She was clearly too enamored with her mysterious guest to steal money, and Mallory has already attracted too much attention to herself.

“I’ll come back soon,” she promised. “Go on and finish your breakfast.”

Mallory was finally free to eat in peace. Again, she had as much as she could, but she couldn’t manage to finish the meat. She washed her hands and her folding knife, which she’d used on the food since she hadn’t been given a sharp knife. She also packed up yesterday’s clothes and took out her cloak. She checked that everything was still in her bags (what, did she think that the hobbits were going to steal from her?), and she put her belt back on. She blew her nose again – it was improving, but she was going to have to wash the handkerchief as soon as this was over. Then, she waited.

Finally, Ivy came back with her arms full. “Here’s some food for the next few days,” she said, setting out bread, sliced meat, cheese, and apples. The meat was actually cold, so Mallory had been wrong about no refrigeration. She wondered how they had achieved that. It was still fall, not winter. Maybe the cellar was cold? “And food to keep,” Ivy added, showing her strips of leathery dried meat, dried berries, and some sort of crackers. “I don’t suppose it’ll be enough, but it’s what Mum would give me. Are you going far? I’ve heard stories of people traveling for months!”

Of course, Ivy wouldn’t have ever traveled anywhere outside the Bree-lands, maybe not even as far as the next town. Traveling took work, especially if you didn’t have a horse. Mallory smiled encouragingly. She wasn’t sure if it would be enough – she’d never measured how much food she ate in a day – but she wasn’t going for actual months.

“Well, I hope you’ll be able to find enough food to get wherever you’re going. Will you come back?”

Mallory certainly hoped so: she didn’t want to say good-bye to Tom Bombadil and Goldberry forever. But she couldn’t exactly make promises. She shrugged.

“I hope you will, and you can talk when you do. I’d like to hear your stories.”

That was the nicest version of “you should talk more” Mallory had ever heard, and she’d heard a lot. She smiled, even though she knew she wasn’t the heroine Ivy was imagining. She wondered how weird Ivy would find the true story. Time travel and alternate universes didn’t seem like the kind of concept she’d have been exposed to. Would she refuse to believe it? Decide Mallory was crazy after all?

“Come on. I’ll help you pack this up.”

They wrapped the food in cloth and put it in her bags. Then, Mallory put on her cloak, and they went downstairs. She felt much safer with the extra layer, but it didn’t protect her from the glare she got from a woman who was obviously Ivy’s mother as she passed the kitchens.

Bob had Kaza ready with his saddle and bridle. “Let me help you, miss,” he said, taking her bags. “Your mother is looking for you, Miss Ivy,” he added. “Says you had better start cleaning the rooms before the guests complain.”

Ivy sighed, and her shoulders slumped. Mallory smiled at her, trying to encourage her to go.

“Good-bye,” she said. “And good luck. I really do hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Mallory waved good-bye. That had certainly been an experience, and she was almost sorry it was over. Ivy sadly went back into the building, and Mallory stepped on a block that Bob pointed to and mounted.

She hesitated there for a moment. She almost didn’t want to leave here, a place where she sort-of knew the rules and sort-of had a friend, to face something unknown. But Butterbur had made it clear she couldn’t stay without money, and she only had a few coins left. Plus, her goal was still ahead of her. She had to move on.

This time, she had the sense to wrap her cloak around her and pull her hood down to go through the streets, but it was only a short way to the east gate. It was open, and this gatekeeper didn’t speak to her. And then, she was out of Bree and on the Road.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) In case anyone here listens to “Exploring the Lord of the Rings” [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLasMbZ4s5vIWPwDhtmXRcn1s0q8qONMGz ](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLasMbZ4s5vIWPwDhtmXRcn1s0q8qONMGz), which is the best resource I’ve found so far if you want to figure out what Tolkien was really thinking and you have TONS of time on your hands), I’m team #BobIsAHobbit.
> 
> 2) Ice houses were a thing in medieval times, and if anyone in Bree would have one, it would be Butterbur. The books do talk about “cold” meat.
> 
> 3) The book says that the hobbits still had bread up to the time they met Glorfindel, which is something like eighteen days into their journey. I have no idea how that could be possible. So I’m going with crackers, like matzoh or something, but not as filling as waybread, which presumably has some protein source in it.
> 
> Beta by Xrai.


	7. 6: The Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The real adventure begins when Mallory leaves Bree for the wilds.

_**October 5-6** _

The first day of traveling was actually pretty enjoyable. Mallory was in populated lands on a clearly marked road. After her stuffy nose finally cleared itself, her only problem was worrying that someone would see her when she went to the bathroom. She kept her back to the Road and wore her cloak so it would cover everything in case anyone walked up behind her, but she didn’t see anyone at all that day, so it ended up not being a problem.

It was nice to be away from the eyes of Bree, but she wasn’t used to being in silence. Even at school, most teachers let them listen to music when they weren’t allowed to talk. But she didn’t have music here. Instead, she started talking to Kaza – about how her legs were still sore, but getting better; about where to stop to use the bathroom and take a break; about how she was worried about how long it would take to get to Rivendell. The last one weighed heaviest on her mind. It had taken the hobbits three weeks and Gandalf seventeen days. The hobbits had been on foot, but Gandalf had been on horseback. He’d been attacked by Ringwraiths, but had that made the journey a lot longer, or was that just how long it was going to take?

She had plenty of food, but most of it was dried. She had the meat for today, and bread and cheese and apples that would last a few days if she limited herself, which of course she’d have to do. But after that? Dry food for weeks. And she couldn’t exactly stretch out the fresh food: it would go bad without refrigeration.

“And if there isn’t grass, I have to worry about making your food last, too,” she added to Kaza. “What about water? My waterskins are only going to last me a few days, and you also have to drink.”

Water wasn’t too much of a problem so far, since there were streams around, but she knew the land would change throughout the journey. She’d rinsed her hands and refilled her waterskin before lunch today – and washed out her handkerchief – but what about when there wasn’t a stream?

Since she had limited her amount of food at lunch, she was hungry all afternoon. It was tempting to just keep eating until she felt full, but she knew she wasn’t going to have any way to get extra. She had to control herself. Besides, her stomach would adjust. Or maybe it wouldn’t, if she had to eat less and less every day. Ugh.

This was what _real_ adventure was like. It wasn’t going to be fun, like staying with Tom and Goldberry had been. Why hadn’t she tried harder to argue against going?

Well, that was because she’d grown up on fantasy books. You went on adventures because you were supposed to. Books were adventure propaganda. (Seemed like the kind of thing Gandalf would be involved in.) Besides, all of this was her own fault for making that wish. If she hadn’t wanted this kind of adventure, she should have been more specific.

There were occasional farms within sight of the Road, as well as several ruins. She thought that someone in a book would try to stop at a farmhouse, but she didn’t think she could ever get the nerve to knock on a door. Even if she did, even if they didn’t think she was a scary ranger, even if they let her in, and even if she got past the language barrier, she wouldn’t have enough to pay them. Plus, she was a girl. Most of the people who did stuff like that were boys, for good reasons.

She stopped Kaza at sunset. “I guess we’d better get off the road and hide,” she said. “The Nazgûl are up at – at Weathertop, I think.” Her skin prickled as soon as the word _Nazgûl_ came out of her mouth. She remembered how Aragorn had told the hobbits not to say Mordor or Sauron out loud, at least not while they were traveling, but this would probably be another one to avoid. “Black Riders, I mean. But it’s not a good idea to push it. And there’s evil humans, too, right? Like Bill Ferny.” And people who weren’t involved with Saruman or Sauron but would just rob or rape her, or both.

There wasn’t much cover here. She finally settled on a slight depression near a tree that would give them some disguise, at least in the dark. She hoped it wasn’t on someone’s property. There wasn’t a fence, so they couldn’t expect her to stay away, right?

She took off Kaza’s tack and checked his hooves. He rolled around in the grass, then started eating. “If I don’t tie you up, will you stay close?” she asked.

Kaza nickered in agreement.

“Good.” There wasn’t any water in sight, so she didn’t risk wasting any to wash her hands. She tried to only touch the cloth wrappings as she ate dinner, not the food itself. She worked a bit with the dagger after that, practicing stabbing a piece of rotten wood that she hoped wouldn’t damage the blade. But she was tired and not very motivated.

Okay. How was she supposed to sleep? She had a blanket, but nothing else. She didn’t know how to build a fire, either. The blanket was going to have to both keep her warm and serve as a bed at the same time. She’d have to keep her boots on, too. They were a pain to take on or off, and her blanket might not cover her feet.

What about a pillow? She could sleep on the book, she considered, but she didn’t want to damage it any more than she had already, not to mention that it was her only connection to home. In the end, she wrapped up her clean clothes in her cloak and used that. It wasn’t very soft, but it was better than the ground under her.

She tried lying on her back, but her lower back got sore from the way it had to bend, and her hair was still in a bun (success!), which hurt her head. She rolled onto her side, but her hips started hurting pretty quickly, too. Sleeping in the wild was definitely an activity meant for men.

Finally, she lay on her side with her knees pulled up to her chest. It changed something about what part of her body was pressing on the ground, so while it wasn’t comfortable, it was bearable. Still, she lay there for a long time before she fell asleep, and then she slept badly, waking up whenever there was the slightest sound and dreaming about school in between. Near morning, she woke up shivering and had to take apart her pillow and pull on her cloak. There were no panic attacks, though, so it could have been worse.

When the birds started singing, she decided to get up. She was sore – really sore – but this time, it wasn’t in the muscles she needed for riding. She brushed herself off, shook out her blanket and cloak, and packed up her clothes. She drank some water and went to pee. She needed to do the other bathroom thing, too, but she felt way too exposed and close to people to do that. But she did take some green leaves off the tree in case she didn’t have anything to wipe herself with later.

“How’d you sleep?” she asked Kaza. He’d stood up all night, from what she’d seen, but he seemed perfectly happy about it. She cut some cheese with her pocketknife and ate it with bread, wishing she could read the newspaper or a fanfic while she had her meal. Then, she put on Kaza’s tack and mounted.

If she was going by Gandalf’s time, she was going to have sixteen more days of this. Sixteen. Days. She was going to be covered in bruises from sleeping on the ground by then. Maybe she’d adjust, somehow. She _really_ hoped she’d adjust to the food. Breakfast had barely done anything to make her less hungry. She missed modern food. Especially fast food. And chips. Chips would have been _amazing_. Or macaroni and cheese or something. God, what if she never got to eat pasta again in her life?

Once she got going, though, the outlook improved. She was still in the Bree-lands, and it was a nice day. Breezy, and a little cold, so she didn’t mind her long sleeves or the physical activity. She finally saw someone: a pair of kids who looked at her, then ran away before she could even figure out what they were doing there. At this point, she was pretty sure everyone was hiding from her and the kids had been the only ones to mess up.

No. They weren’t hiding from _her_. The Ringwraiths had ridden by a few days ago. They were hiding from _them_. That didn’t make her feel good, even if she knew the Nazgûl were all at Weathertop and the Ford. _They attacked Frodo last night,_ she realized. Yikes.

That afternoon, she started to see marshes to her left. She remembered Sam, or someone, complaining about the bugs: “What do they eat when they can’t get hobbit?” She was safe on the Road, though, or so she thought. Once the sun started to go down, she changed her mind.

She was miserable by the time she stopped that evening: tired, sore, hungry, bug-bitten, and getting cold. She set up camp like the night before, off of the Road on the side of a hill that she hoped would keep her warmer by blocking some of the wind. Tonight was clear-skied, and as she started trying to find a comfortable way to lie (on her other side from last night, but with her cloak around her this time), she saw the stars come out.

Mallory hadn’t seen the stars since she’d gotten to Middle Earth. She’d been indoors until last night, and then it had been cloudy. She’d had clear nights when she’d gone to summer camp years ago, but she’d always been hurrying to get to bed, and there were trees obscuring most of the sky. Besides, there was always a bit of light coming from the cabins. Now, she could just lie there and look, barely any trees, and no artificial lights at all.

It was stunning. “There’s the Big Dipper,” she told Kaza, looking over the marshes. That and Orion were the only two constellations she knew how to recognize. But she was astonished at how many stars were behind it, too, little flecks of white on the dark background. And then she noticed the band of light across the sky, stars so close together she couldn’t pick all of them apart.

“Oh, my God, Kaza,” she whispered. “That’s the Milky Way. People always say they can see the Milky Way, and it never made sense – that’s what they’re talking about!”

Kaza looked over at her because she was talking to him, but he didn’t seem interested in the stars at all. She was the only one, right now, who knew how amazing this was.

She lay on her back for a while, watching. She understood so well now why the Elves were obsessed with stars, and why ancient cultures had made up stories based on them. Finally, when her eyes started closing on their own, she rolled onto her side, pulled her blanket over herself, and fell asleep.

* * *

She woke up a few hours later with her heart racing. For more than just the usual few seconds, she thought something was actually wrong, and she jumped up to her feet and looked around for wargs or trolls or Ringwraiths. But there wasn’t anything attacking her.

Kaza nudged her with his nose, making a concerned sound. “It’s okay,” she whispered, surprised at how shaky her voice was. She’d never tried to speak during times like this before. She leaned against him to help her get back down to the ground without falling. “It’s just a panic attack. It’ll pass. They always do.”

He nuzzled her again, then took a step back and seemed to go back to sleep. She squeezed her arms around her legs until the panic passed and she fell asleep, too.

* * *

_**October 7 – October 9** _

The next morning was more or less the same as the first. And so was the rest of the day. And the next day. Traveling, Mallory realized, was _boring_. Back home, she’d known her routine. School days were different than weekends and holidays, but otherwise, she knew exactly what to expect. There were good things sometimes – eating something she liked for dinner or a new chapter unexpectedly being posted on a story she was following – and bad things sometimes – a panic attack at night or having to answer a question in class. But there wasn’t any more variation than that. Traveling was the same. It was a new routine, but once she’d learned what to do each day, it was still a routine. There wasn’t much to think about except what food to eat and when to stop and pee. In fact, there were fewer decisions to make now than on a normal school day, and nothing to read. There were no weekends or vacations in traveling, either, so the only variety was looking at the scenery around her.

And then, there were the thoughts of never coming home. It wasn’t just Mom and Sandra, it was everything she had enjoyed. Any time she started reading a fanfic that wasn’t finished, she knew that there was a chance she’d never get to read the end. But it seemed unfair that, now, the end might be posted and she would never be there to see it. Then there were TV shows and movies. She wouldn’t be there to see the next season of _The Mandalorian_. She had never gotten around to the last season of _Supernatural_ , either, which she still watched despite everything. Plus, there were all the books she’d never gotten around to reading – she’d had a list back home. And then there was the new Mulan, or the next Fantastic Beasts movie (it was still interesting, even if it was crap), and all the movies she didn’t even know about yet. Everything was gone, all at once, and thinking about that was hard.

At least she was sleeping better now: after three nights in a row of bad sleep, her body insisted on it. And there _were_ ways that it was better than her days at home. She knew she was going somewhere. Every step Kaza took was a step in the right direction, and at the end of that road was Elves and Rivendell. That helped.

By the fourth day, her clothes were bothering her to a point that she couldn’t ignore it anymore. Her legs itched like crazy, she couldn’t get the dirt off her face, and the smell of her own sweat would hit her at unexpected times. She didn’t want to go swimming, because if she got her hair wet, she’d have to take it out of the bun to let it dry properly. She wouldn’t be able to put it back up as securely as Goldberry had, and she’d be stuck redoing it every morning and night. Of course, it was already starting to come out, but for the most part, it had stayed put (the grease helped that, honestly), and she wanted it that way for as long as possible. Plus, her only option for a towel was the hand-towel-sized washcloth, which wasn’t exactly clean, itself. But she had no choice but to wash her clothes, if nothing else.

She found a good stream the next day. It wasn’t more than a foot deep, but there were some calm areas that looked like they’d work for washing. She sat down and pulled off her boots. Her toes were a bit wrinkled, though she hadn’t noticed her socks getting damp. Sweat, probably. There was no way it was good for her to keep her shoes on for days on end.

There was definitely nobody around, but she still ducked behind a tree to undress. (Behind? Behind compared to whom? Kaza? He was grazing right now.) She felt bad putting clean clothes on dirty skin, but it was the best option she had. In the new bra and leggings, she washed her dirty clothes as well as she could without getting herself wet. Not her blanket, even though it probably had more dirt on it than anything else did – that would take forever to dry. Then, she laid them all out to dry on the cleanest patch of ground she could find, put on her shirt, and sat down to eat lunch. Her cheese was going moldy. She cut off that part and decided she’d have to eat the rest of it for dinner before it all went bad. She was lucky her bread hadn’t done the same thing, but it was going to run out soon, too.

Five days down. She had a long time left. _The Lord of the Rings_ was just about the only book series that gave her any sense of how long it took to get places or do things, but feeling it in real time was different. Oh, well. She just had to turn off her brain and keep moving forward, same as she always did. She’d get there in the end.

She was still hungry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Believe it or not, I wrote the paragraph about how it feels to lose everything at once BEFORE the coronavirus. Editing that during lockdown was really something.
> 
> 2) I think I mentioned that I've written all of books I and II (34 chapters all together). I'm finding it difficult to write book III, made more difficult by the fact that I didn't have a computer for two weeks, moved house and changed jobs in the same week, and have had my car break down twice within a month. And this all happened at the same time: I literally had to wait to get my car repaired the second time until we'd finished moving house. Anyway, I've decided not to post a new chapter unless I add 3,000 words to book III since I posted the last chapter. I did a lot of catching up this week! But if I'd been doing this all along, we'd be on, like, chapter 3. So if I disappear for a while, you can assume my muse has abandoned me and I haven't been writing.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr by the way (Elamarth-Calmagol), though I don't really know how to use it properly, so you can check that if you're ever worried that I literally died.
> 
> Beta by Xrai


	8. 7: Past Weathertop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mallory passes her first big landmark since Bree.

_**October 10** _

The next day was gloomy. The only thing that had made Mallory’s time riding more interesting was looking at the scenery, but the hills that had grown up around her weren’t pretty in this light. Besides, she knew that the tall hill she saw must be Weathertop.

Her stomach dropped every time she looked at it. _It’s not evil,_ she reminded herself. _Just because that’s where the Black Riders caught up with Frodo doesn’t make it evil, not like the barrow-downs or anything. Aragorn chose to go there. So did Gandalf. It’s the Ringwraiths that brought the evil, not anything inherent in the land._ Besides, there was nothing to worry about up there _now_. It still looked creepy to her, though.

“Does it make you nervous?” she asked Kaza when they stopped. She’d sat down with the hill behind her so she could resist looking at it every five seconds, but that just made it feel like something was going to creep up on her, so it didn’t help. Kaza, on the other hand, looked perfectly happy, chewing on some grass and flicking away flies. Well, actually, at the moment, he looked like he thought she was nuts. “Am I nuts?” she asked.

He _definitely_ looked like he thought so.

“Oh, well. At least I’m not hearing you talk or something.” She laughed at herself. “In a book, this is exactly when you’d reveal that you actually _can_ talk. It’s not like Tolkien doesn’t have talking animals. But this isn’t Narnia. And I might be in a book, if that’s how this works, but my book is still _The Lord of the Rings_ , not Narnia. Look, if you can talk, you should probably let me know right now, okay?”

Kaza snorted at her and tore off some more grass.

“Okay, I deserved that. I guess even _I_ can go crazy from being alone for too long.” She could only imagine how the extroverted Sandra would be handling this.

By the time they actually _got_ to Weathertop, though, she was seriously considering climbing it. This was almost a more important book landmark than Bree. Most people would consider it more important than Tom Bombadil or the barrow-downs. And she’d have a great view from up there.

Which, of course, was exactly what Aragorn had thought, and see where that had gotten him. She remembered how standing for too long on the top of the hill had been the thing that attracted danger in the books, not the hobbits’ fire like in the movies. (In fact, that fire had saved them in the books.) But the Ringwraiths weren’t here anymore. Probably.

She passed by Weathertop and went on, but she slept worse that night than she had since her first night in the wild, always expecting something – someone – to get her. When she had been west of the hill, she’d known for sure that there were no Nazgûl around. Now, she had crossed over into their hunting ground, and she wouldn’t be out of it again until she reached the Ford.

And the Ford? She couldn’t safely cross it until after the flood came down to take the Ringwraiths. That was their chokepoint, where they were going to get Frodo, and they could get her just as easily. They weren’t nice. They wouldn’t look at her interdimensional-traveler-passport (too bad nobody had given her one) and wave her through once they realized she wasn’t the one they were looking for. They’d want to block anyone from crossing. So if her dates were right and this was the night of the tenth, she wouldn’t be able to cross it until the evening of the twentieth. Ten more days in the wild. Ten days or more. And she wouldn’t leave Nazgûl country until it was over.

* * *

**_October 11_ **

It rained for most of the next day. Mallory wrapped her cloak around herself and pulled the hood up to try to stay dry. But even though it was only really drizzling, it was continuous, and everything got at least damp. She didn’t think it got very deep into her hair, although she sort of wished it had – her scalp had started itching from not having brushed or washed her hair for too long, and she was going to have to do something soon. Both her saddlebags and the wrappings around her food and the book were supposed to be water-resistant, though, so she didn’t worry too much about that.

She found a place under a rock overhang to sleep that night. She pulled off her boots and socks to let her feet dry, and she took out a strip of meat and tore it apart. It was leathery and tough. She chewed each shredded piece thoroughly. There was still a bit of bread, though not very good. She wasn’t going to be able to convince herself to ration dried fruit as well as she should. It was the only tasty thing she had left.

She finished eating and got ready for bed. She slept much better that night, and the sky that morning was clearer. But her hair was driving her crazy and coming out of the braids, and her clothes smelled. She swore that if she saw water today (and she had better find some, because she was running out of water to drink, and Kaza had started going for puddles), she’d wash. Hair, too. She was going to just have to deal.

Luck was with her. The first stream she saw was rock-filled, shallow, and difficult to do anything with, but when she followed it up the hill a little way, she found a small waterfall that had created a pool. It wasn’t wide enough to properly swim, but it was chest-deep and easily enough water to submerge herself in. She took off her boots and washed her socks, then pulled her hairpins out and stuck them on her clean (well, clean- _er_ ) shirt for safekeeping. She undid the hairties, too, and pulled out her braids.

Thank God. (Or Eru?) She’d gone way too long with her hair like that. She shook it out and tried to comb it with her fingers. She needed the water, though. She didn’t want to swim naked, or even in her underwear, and her clothes needed cleaning, too, so she decided to just keep them on.

She dipped her toe in. God, that was cold! She took a deep breath, steeled herself, and stepped down onto a submerged rock.

It was way more slippery than she’d expected. Before she could even react to the freezing cold, she fell face-first into the deeper water under the waterfall. Good thing she was planning to do her hair anyway. She struggled to her feet and tried to wipe the water out of her eyes, her teeth chattering. But she couldn’t get the falling water out of her face, so she felt her way over to a rock and sat down until she had her balance and vision back, shivering the whole time. Then she went back in, more careful about her balance this time, and started working. She ran her fingers through her hair and rubbed her scalp until she felt better. There wasn’t much she could do about actually cleaning her body, but she made sure the water got through her clothes, and anything would help. She adjusted to the temperature of the water once she started moving, so she wasn’t as cold by the end of it.

She seriously regretted wearing the clothes into the water when she got out and had to try to take them off. The leggings and shirt were already skintight when they were dry. Now, they were heavy with water and suctioned onto her body. She spent several minutes fighting her way out of them and into her dry, blue outfit, then sat for a few hours in the warm sunlight until her hair was dry enough to comb. She couldn’t make a ponytail with it, but once she’d smoothed everything out, she found that she could manage a braid. Maybe she could handle this.

Mallory packed everything up, and then, she and Kaza got back down to the Road and rode on until nightfall. The ground under Mallory that night was especially rocky and uncomfortable, and there were barely any trees to break the wind, and she didn’t sleep well. She dreamed that she was back home and trying to explain where she’d been, and then that she was in Rivendell trying to get Elrond to understand where she had come from, and then – noticing she couldn’t focus on Elrond’s face, because she knew he wasn’t Hugo Weaving, but had never found a good piece of art of what else he could look like – she was in the movie itself, during the Council of Elrond, trying to argue that she hadn’t pledged her dagger to Frodo and was definitely _not_ going with the Fellowship. Then, she woke up shivering. She rolled onto her back to try to warm that side of her body up, and she lay there, staring at the stars, until she fell asleep again.

* * *

**_October 12-13_ **

She woke up even more sore than she was most mornings, and in a bad mood. That day was unremarkable and boring, more journeying through the hills. The trees were beginning to come back, but where she ended up making camp only had a few and no grass for Kaza, though they had found some water in the afternoon. She fed him some of the grain in her saddlebags.

She woke up in the middle of the night to Kaza’s breath on her face and stars shining above her. “What is it?” she asked, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she noticed that she, also, felt like something was going on. There was no sound except wind, none of the insects or frogs or whatever that she usually heard and ignored. Something was wrong. Something was Wrong.

_You’re having a panic attack,_ she told herself. Except, she wasn’t. She could breathe, and her heart wasn’t unbearably fast, and besides, it had been Kaza who woke her up, not her own adrenaline. This was not a drill. It was real.

She sat up, wide awake, her body ready for whatever was about to happen. There could be any number of things coming to attack her. They didn’t even have to be malicious, just animals looking for food. But whatever it was, it had scared _everything_ away, which made her think it was something really big, or… no, it probably wasn’t Nazgûl. Probably.

_I should not have done this. I should never have let Tom convince me to go out when I_ knew _the Black Riders were riding around looking for people._

Fortunately, all she needed to do was roll up her blanket and spare clothes and tack up Kaza. Her hands were shaking. She checked the location of her dagger and her knife. Helpful for animals, but not Ringwraiths, if they were out there. She knew what happened if someone stabbed one of them, and she didn’t have “the hands of the king” around to heal her. But – her mind raced – their robes were real, and their horses and saddles were real…

_It’s probably just an animal,_ she reminded herself. Which types of bears were you supposed to play dead around and which types were you supposed to fight? She wished she’d studied this, but she’d never thought she’d need it. Or what if it was one of those things that animals could sense ahead of time, like an earthquake? Surely this wasn’t an earthquake-prone area. Definitely not a volcano.

She took a deep breath and shook herself. She went to mount, but just then, she heard a hoof strike a rock. Another horse was out there. A _horse_.

Fear flooded her veins, and she froze in indecision, caught between a terror of making a sound and a desperate need to leave. Her heart pounded in her ears, drowning out everything else. But the worst part was the knowledge that she had made a terrible mistake in choosing to come out here, and now there was nothing she could do to take it back, no option except to face the consequences. This was exactly the feeling that made her too scared to ever consider committing suicide: she was sure that she’d want to undo it as soon as it was too late, and she’d have to spend her last minutes knowing there was nothing she could do. But she hadn’t wanted or chosen to die when she agreed to go alone to Rivendell.

_Move,_ she thought. _Move, before they find me._

And then, she saw it.

Standing on a rock above her was a black-cloaked man on a black horse, silhouetted against the starry sky. It really looked just like a man, like if it lifted up its head she would see its face under its old, worn hood, like there would be hands in its plain cloth gloves and feet in its leather boots. It wasn’t like the movies, with all the threatening metal and sense of foreignness. She could almost believe it was just another traveler, which somehow made it seem even worse that it was absolutely _terrifying_.

_Move!_ she thought again as the horse leapt down and made for them – and Mallory was sure it was the horse, not the Ringwraith itself, that knew where they were – but she couldn’t.

Kaza scrabbled on the rocks, panicked. Then, she heard leaves rustling behind her, and she knew there was no way she was going to escape. One Nazgûl, she might possibly be able to do something about, if she could break out of her instinct to freeze. But two? No way. Even _Éowyn_ had only fought one.

“Come to us,” whispered the black shape in front of her, and there was something strange about his voice – beyond the fact that the hiss was on the wrong word – but she wasn’t sure what. A breath of cold air seemed to flow over her at the words.

_No!_ she wanted to answer, but her tongue stuck in her mouth. She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know what they knew or whether they were just going after everyone on the Road, but if they took her with them, the things they would find out… 

That snapped her out of it. She put her foot in the stirrup and jumped up faster and easier than she could ever remember doing before. She drew her dagger. The closer Ringwraith swung out its gloved hand and grabbed her left arm. She tried to twist away, but the hand – if it was a hand – was hard and cold and strong and held on.

Mallory had been to plenty of self-defense classes, plus the year of karate when she was little and the benefit of having a sister who was a black belt to show her moves. But she’d never tried to break someone’s grip when she was on horseback. And all the advice on handling aggressors went out the window when they were evil undead creatures and there was nobody anywhere nearby to help.

_Use the story! What’s the point of coming from the future, anyway?_

But her knowledge of the future just told her fighting them wouldn’t make a difference – there were still nine of them at the Ford. But she wasn’t part of the book, so maybe…?

She slashed at the cloak. The cloth caught and ripped, and there was just enough light from the stars that she was sure that she should have seen something under it, but she didn’t.

_Think!_ She had to know something. What had Frodo done?

“Elbereth Gilthoniel,” she said. The words sounded silly and weak and flat. She flashed back to every time she’d ever been told to speak up at school, from being too scared to speak above a whisper in kindergarten to stuttering and blushing and mumbling when she was called on in front of the class today. But this wasn’t school. This was life or death.

_Do not fear while you are on his back,_ Tom had said, and some of her courage came back.

“Elbereth Gilthoniel!” she shouted, shocked at the volume of her own voice. She tried to think of other names. “Manwe and Varda and –” Maybe not Mandos, he dealt with dead people, and she didn’t want to die. Who else was there? She’d gone blank. “Elbereth!” she shouted again.

The iron grip on her arm let go. Instead, the Ringwraith reached down towards her saddlebag, the one with the book in it. As the body turned, to her surprise, her dagger hit something solid under the cloak – solid, but invisible, and deadly. The cold was instant and shocking. It wasn’t the cold of ice water or snow. It was more like plunging a bare hand into liquid nitrogen, and so intense that it made her teeth hurt. The Ringwraith’s fingers just missed the saddle bag it was reaching for, but she jerked back, almost losing her balance. Fortunately, she caught the reins, because Kaza chose that moment to kick out at the nearest horse. There was an unearthly howl. In the moment of confusion, Kaza saw his chance and bolted with Mallory clinging onto his back, into the wilds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Not sure whether Mallory saying “Elbereth Gilthoniel” would have the same effect as Frodo saying it, with him being an elf-friend and all. But it would definitely give the Ringwraiths pause, more so after Frodo used it very effectively against them on Weathertop, and Elbereth might actually be listening to her for all we know.
> 
> 2) How to survive a Ringwraith attack: ride a good horse. Well, before they got the fell beasts as their mounts, anyway. (I can just imagine them going back to Sauron like, “We kept getting our butts kicked by other people on horses! And Glorfindel on foot, but you can’t expect us to fight Glorfindel, I mean… [mumble mumble]. Anyway, we can’t go out again on horseback!” and Sauron’s like “Fine, I’ll give you something nobody else in the world has, because I just invented it. Happy now?” And they’re like, “Yeah, but did I mention all these random people somehow know the elvish names for You-Know-Who? There’s a conspiracy going on or something…”)
> 
> Beta by Xrai


	9. 8: Black Riders and White Rider

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mallory escaped the Ringwraiths… for now.

_**October 14** _

Kaza ran. Mallory crouched low over the horse’s neck to avoid hitting the tree branches that he seemed to be ignoring, and so she would be ready for him to jump, which he did often and without waiting for her to signal him. They had left the Road behind, but judging by the light that shone in their faces when the sun started to rise, they were still going east. They would have to get back up to the Road soon. She’d heard often enough that if you went off the path in the woods, you’d never be able to find it again, and if she was lucky enough to make her way to the river (which river was next?), she would be a sitting duck hunting for the bridge.

Out of nowhere, there was a wailing cry behind them that was as cold as ice and sharp as glass, freezing Mallory’s insides the same way that the horrible chill of the wraith’s body had done. She would have thought it was just a scream, or an attempt to scare her, except that it skidded and tore inside her head, a feeling like twisting metal, as her mind almost caught onto the meaning of words but couldn’t quite hold onto them. The Ringwraiths were _talking_ to each other.

Kaza ran faster.

At dawn, she pulled at the reins. Kaza shifted from foot to foot nervously, his ears twitching like he was on high alert, but he was breathing hard and clearly needed the rest. Mallory hadn’t realized how bad her shivering was until she dismounted. She could hardly even pull her leg over the saddle, and she collapsed once her feet touched the ground. The unimaginable cold in her left arm had eased somewhat, but a chill was crawling up the other one to match it.

Black breath. _I’m going to die,_ she thought, but she was too tired to be angry or scared.

She dragged herself to her feet. She still had the hilt of her dagger in her right hand, only a jagged half inch of its blade left. It had broken, like Narsil. She’d thought blades that hit Ringwraiths melted, but then again, their _own_ blades melted, so maybe she had it mixed up. There were a lot of shattered blades in Lord of the Rings either way.

There had never been any point in fighting them. She knew there would be nine at the Ford, and she was no Éowyn. Not Éowyn or Rey or Arya or any other hero. She couldn’t fight.

She couldn’t keep thinking that way, though. She wrapped up the hilt, since the bit of blade would still be sharp, and, still shivering, she put it in her saddlebags along with the scabbard.

She pulled her cloak out of her bag and wrapped it around her shoulders. It took her several tries to knot it at her neck, and then she almost spilled water out of her waterskin because her hands were shaking so badly. _I’m going to die,_ she thought again, wishing she could call for Tom and be taken back home.

“Home”? No, Tom and Goldberry’s house was not home. But Goldberry had said she would always be welcome. She’d been happy there. She should have just refused to leave. Now, it was too late to go back. Why had she done this?

She put her waterskin back and ducked behind a tree to use the bathroom, her hands shaking so hard that she could barely manage to use the laces and button on her clothes. Then, she walked back and looked at the saddle. Kaza was clearly anxious to go. They had to go, didn’t they? Since she didn’t have the Ring, and she hadn’t started to fade yet (she hoped), the Nazgûl would probably have no way to find her except by scent scent, but they were using the Road and so was she, so she couldn’t feel safe. And she had no idea how long she’d have before the black breath took over her body.

She had to get back up on Kaza. End of discussion. If there was any chance of surviving, it was only by staying on the move. How far away was the Ford? But the Ford was where the rest of the Black Riders were…

“On three,” she muttered, putting her foot in the stirrup. “One, two, three, up!”

She jumped up and swung her leg over. She sat there for a few seconds, gasping. Then, Kaza started to walk again.

She could feel the horse’s nervousness, in the way he moved and the way he looked around him. If _he_ was scared, what was _she_ supposed to be? She blew on her fingers, but it only warmed them for a moment, and then they got colder when the water vapor in her breath evaporated off the skin. She pulled her cloak tighter around her arms and turned Kaza to the left, which should have been north towards the Road, if her sense of direction was right.

It was. They came to the top of a slope, and there it was, a path cleared out from the rocks and bushes and trees. She didn’t see or hear anything. She took a deep, slow breath and let Kaza walk down to Road, then turn east and continue on their journey.

Then, her breath hitched. It caught in her throat for a moment. Her heart skipped a beat and thudded down again, and she couldn’t breathe.

At first, she was too shocked to be properly afraid. She had never been awake for the beginning of a panic attack before. She’d always thought that this was because she could control herself when she was awake – take deep breaths and settle her mind down and all of that. But here she was, the fear racing through her and taking over.

She pulled on the reins, afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep her balance if he kept going. _Maybe the Black Riders are back_ , she thought. But she couldn’t see any danger, and she didn’t hear anything except her own heartbeat. No, this wasn’t like last night. This was a genuine, pointless panic attack.

_I can’t do this right now._ She had to be focused and able to ride and to fight again.

Fight with _what_ , exactly? She didn’t have a single weapon other than her tiny knife for eating. She was helpless. All she would be able to do was trust in Kaza to run.

A hand seemed to squeeze her heart at the thought, sending her mind flying away from her body. It might have been a few seconds or a few minutes or a few hours that she floated there, unable to process what was happening. A few minutes, she thought. A few minutes, because when she found her way back, she was still panicking, and her panic attacks didn’t last hours.

This kind of thing had always happened to her when she was in bed. She wanted to hug herself and squeeze the anxiety out. She wanted to use the steadiness of the ground and the pressure on her legs to stop herself from dissociating again. She wanted to lie down. But if she dismounted, and the Ringwraiths came, she wouldn’t have a chance. And she’d barely been able to mount last time she’d gotten down. She only felt worse now. She might not be able to get back on Kaza at all.

Trying to control her breathing, she turned her body and pointed Kaza to a patch of trees. They could at least try to hide while she dealt with this. _Breathe,_ she thought. _This will pass._

But it only got worse. _Is it bedtime?_ she thought, the past few minutes slipping away from her. She went off the path to sleep every night. But no, it wasn’t bedtime, she just needed to hide. _Hide?_ she wondered. Yes, hide from the Ringwraiths. Ringwraiths? Really? Were they real, or had she dreamed them? She _did_ have to hide, right? Or was that all in her imagination? Was she asleep now? Was this a nightmare?

She shook her head, trying to get the fuzziness out, then shook it again, unsure whether she had really done it the first time or just thought about it. How did she fix her brain? What if this feeling didn’t go away?

_Breathe,_ she thought. _It always ends. And it always will._

Distantly, she noticed how Kaza looked even more agitated now: twisting his head around to look at her and the land around him. Horses felt the anxiety of their riders, she remembered, the same as she could feel his. The muscles in her legs felt tight, but she couldn’t squeeze them, because that was how she communicated with him – he didn’t even need her to say “walk” anymore. She tried to make her hands grip the reins, but they didn’t seem to be working right, and she couldn’t feel the leather. “It’s –” she started, but she heard her voice break, tangled up with her breath. It dropped itself to a whisper. “This will pass,” came out of her mouth. “This…”

Her hands pulled on her cloak again, her arms wrapping around her body. She wanted to be in bed. She knew what to do there. She would know this was going to end up all right.

_This will pass._ She tried to match her breaths to the words. _This will pass._ She tried not to squeeze Kaza’s sides. _This will pass._ A scream grew inside her chest, pressing on her ribs, trying to get out. _This will pass. This will pass. This will pass…_

* * *

Mallory was still shaking when they started moving again. She was tired – exhausted, really – but she couldn’t go to sleep. Everything felt like a dream. The panic attack, the Ringwraiths, the stop to use the bathroom. Surely it had all happened, but she couldn’t convince her brain of that.

She hadn’t noticed how silent and empty the Road was since she’d gotten past the first day or two, but now, that was all she could think of. The quiet. The loneliness. Just her and a horse, and nobody else for miles. Nobody to help her. Nobody she could go to. Her only hope was Rivendell, out in the distance, across at least two rivers. Was she ever going to get there?

Maybe there were rangers nearby, and she just hadn’t run into any yet. Well, there was at least _one_ ranger around: Aragorn. But she was well behind them. Besides, the last thing she wanted was for her to be picked up by the hobbits and end up a Tenth Walker on the way to Mordor. Then again, better to be a cliché than to die and leave her body out here, unburied, being eaten by animals.

_Maybe this actually_ is _a dream. Maybe this whole thing is a very long, vivid dream. Maybe none of it is real._

That would be the best outcome. She’d died in dreams before and just woken up. If she knew for sure that was how it would happen, she’d consider just letting herself die and giving up on the adventure, but she still had no clue how she had gotten here or what would happen if she died, so she couldn’t give up.

_Just keep going. Like everything in your life, just keep moving forward, and somehow, something will happen._

Her mind was still running in weary circles when something abruptly changed in Kaza. His head went up again, and he suddenly seemed to want to trot again, or gallop, instead of the tired walk he’d slowed down to.

“No,” she said. “No, no, _no_.” Her eyes stung with tears. “Please, no. I can’t do this again. I can’t.”

Despair washed over her. _Fight again_ had still only been a theoretical possibility during the panic attack. Now, it seemed likely. And she didn’t even have a dagger. They had to get off the Road, even if that meant getting lost.

Abruptly, Kaza took off downhill, to the right of the Road. Mallory’s numb fingers just barely managed to hold onto the reins, which was the only thing that kept her from falling backwards onto the ground at the sudden movement and change of direction. Looking behind her, she saw black shapes through the trees, and she felt as if one of their freezing hands had taken hold of her heart. But they weren’t running after them. They were smelling and listening.

“Stop, Kaza,” she whispered. “They don’t know where we are.”

She’d never really known whether he really understood what she was saying or just her tone of voice, but he understood at least one word, because he slowed down right away. She could almost feel him shaking with fear, but he walked carefully now, stepping around dry leaves and sticks that would make noise. Mallory felt sick to her stomach and weak in her legs, and the feeling got worse each time she looked back towards the Road and each time she heard the horses’ hoofbeats coming towards her. This would be the end. When they found her, there would be nothing she could do. But Kaza walked on.

Then, she heard bells.

Shit.

_Shit._

The air was torn apart with another of the Ringwraiths’ cries, an undulating wail that felt like glass in her ears and stopped Kaza in his tracks. And then, the noise of running hooves, and a glimpse of white through the trees.

The Black Riders were running away from the newcomer in fear, but whether by coincidence or on purpose, they were running towards _her_. She squeezed Kaza’s sides. “Go,” she said, her voice cracking. “Go!”

They broke through the trees then: two black creatures on black horses and one rider in white and green and gold atop a pure white horse. One of the Ringwraiths seemed to spot her, or maybe hear her, and spurred his horse in her direction. Kaza let out a squeal and wheeled around, heading downhill, away from everyone.

Mallory crouched down again, struggling to keep hold of the reins. When she looked over her shoulder, she saw the Nazgûl reaching out with a black-gloved hand, reaching for her. But behind it, the white rider stood in his stirrups, impossibly tall and blindingly bright in a beam of sunlight, and shouted words that rang with power, echoing through the rocks and trees: “In the name of Elbereth, if you touch her, I will tear you from this form and return you to the darkness from whence you came!”

The black horse behind her reared up, then turned and fled with the other. The Elf followed, his horse dodging through the trees to catch them.

Mallory sat down and reined Kaza in, her heart beating so fast it hurt. They were gone, for now – the Black Riders and the Elf that she didn’t want to guess at the identity of yet. And maybe the Riders would go back to chasing after Frodo, not her. But she still had a long way to go, and all she wanted right now was a bed with a blanket and a heater. _I should go back,_ she thought again. _Back to Tom and Goldberry._ But that was a long way away, too. Maybe longer than going forward.

Feeling hopeless, she pointed Kaza towards the Road, and they walked slowly, wearily, uphill.

* * *

She didn’t make it that far. Her hands wouldn’t move anymore. She tried looping the reins around her arms, but that didn’t give her much security as she struggled to stay upright. Finally, she fell sideways, and even though the reins did catch her, there was no way for her to do anything from that position but try to control her fall. She pulled herself free, rolled to her hands and knees, and crawled over to the roots of a tree and sat there, too tired to go on but too cold and miserable to sleep.

She wasn’t sure how long it was before she heard bells again. Kaza whinnied, his ears pricking up. Suddenly, she was awake, watching the white rider come out of the trees towards her. _Please don’t let this be Glorfindel,_ she prayed. There were other riders from Rivendell, of course, but only one had taken the Road, and most likely only one had shining gold hair like that, or bells on his harness. Besides, you didn’t get prophetic dreams for no reason: she should have seen this coming from her very first night at Tom and Goldberry’s house. But if it was Glorfindel, wouldn’t his meeting her change the story? What if he met the hobbits later than he had in the books, or not at all? If one thing could change, anything could change, up to and including Sauron’s defeat.

She didn’t want to be here. But she was too exhausted to move.

_Please don’t be Glorfindel,_ Mallory thought again, closing her eyes as if that would make him disappear.

She opened them again when she heard the Elf say, “Halt.” His horse – Asfaloth – stood still, and he dismounted lightly. Asfaloth went over to Kaza, and they sniffed each other. There were more than bells on his harness, there were gems, too, and a giant feather that made the whole thing look a bit ridiculous.

“Well met,” Glorfindel said, his voice clear and warm like a sunny sky. “They are gone – they do not dare challenge me in such small numbers. But who are you?”

Mallory stared at him. She couldn’t help it. Never mind _who_ he was, her mind was imploding as she looked at _what_ he was. He was tall – _tall_ tall, like nobody she’d ever met in real life. Even if she had been standing, he would have towered over her. He didn’t look muscular, but something about the way he moved told her that he had a lot of strength in his body. His skin was pale, and while it didn’t glow like the descriptions in the book, it was warm in a way that made her seem flat and dull by comparison. His hair was a rich gold color, more like Goldberry’s hair than the pale blond of the movie Elves, and even though he wore it long and loose, it didn’t look as if it had been tangled by the wind at all. She could see one of his ears, and it wasn’t pointed – well, it was, but not sharply, just a little narrower at the top, not at all inhuman. But she’d heard that all Tolkien had ever said on elvish ears was that they were leaf-shaped, and besides, she didn’t need his ears to identify him. She’d never in her life heard a voice like his. Even more striking, his eyes shone a brilliant blue as if there was a light behind them, and there was something ancient and otherworldly in them that didn’t match the youth in his face and body. Looking at them made the hair on her arms stand up. The strangest part of it all was that no part of him looked like a costume or manipulated photo. He was real, maybe realer than she was, and he stood so close she could reach out and touch him.

He smiled when he saw the way she was looking at him. “I am an Elf, if you cannot guess,” he said, squatting down in front of her. “My name is Glorfindel.”

Strangely, she understood the name an instant after he said it, as if it was a word that was being translated. It seemed like he had said something slightly different, as if he had a strange accent. Of course, she must be the one pronouncing it wrong – Anglicizing the Sindarin name.

“But you are cold, and tired,” he said. He took a flask off his belt, poured a little into a small cup, and offered it to her. She looked at it. It was his miruvor, and like the horse’s harness, Tolkien hadn’t been exaggerating about the decorations. It would have cost a fortune for anyone but an Elf.

“This will help,” he said. “Drink.”

She shook her head. Even if her hands would work, she couldn’t do that. If she did, this would become real – Ringwraiths and all. And Glorfindel – this was really Glorfindel!

“Can you hold it?”

She shook her head again. All that she was getting from her hands now was the most intense cold she’d ever experienced. She couldn’t hold anything.

He put his hand on the side of her head. She flinched. “You needn’t fear,” he said. “Let me help you, and then tell me who you are. I have not had word of a traveler such as you on the Road.”

_A traveler such as you._ He clearly meant _a girl_. Then again, he wasn’t wrong. Who else was on the Road right now, other than rangers and the hobbits?

She let him hold her head steady with one hand as he brought the cup to her lips and tipped it into her mouth. She swallowed the liquid. Then, she took a deep breath, feeling some energy come back to her. She might even be able to stand up. Thank God.

He put the miruvor flask and cup back on his belt, then gently caught her hand. He opened her curled-up fingers and rubbed her palm. The biting, aching cold eased, and after a moment, she began to feel his touch as her skin came back to life. But he was still looking at her to speak.

She should say something, just so he would know he couldn’t understand her. But her mind froze if she tried to pursue that thought. She couldn’t do it: she wasn’t brave enough. Maybe it was better if he just thought she couldn’t talk.

“You do understand me, do you not?” he asked.

She nodded.

He released her hand and reached for the other. She hesitated, holding it back. Now that she was feeling a bit better, she couldn’t help thinking that accepting even more “magic” might not be the best idea, even if that hand was still so cold it hurt.

He took it and pulled gently but insistently, and she gave in. “This happened before I found you,” he said quietly.

She nodded. She wiggled her fingers on her free hand. They moved! Thank God again.

“Did you fight against them?”

She nodded.

“That must have taken great courage,” he said. “But you have paid for it.”

Yes, she had.

Looking at her hand, he murmured something in a beautiful, lyrical language that sounded like a prayer. “A boon, Estë, I beg of thee— a boon only, albeit one to heal the breath of dark kings, and bring peace upon us riders.”

Chills went up Mallory’s back that had nothing to do with actually being cold. He looked back up at her and asked, back in what was presumably Westron, “Are you injured?”

She shook her head.

“Do you travel alone?”

She nodded.

“Have you passed any other travelers on the Road?”

She shook her head.

“Which way are you going? East or west?”

She looked around. She thought she knew which way the road was, so she could make a guess as to directions, but the sun had risen now, and it was a lot less obvious.

“East, to the mountains?” he asked, pointing. “Or west, to the sea?”

She pointed, hesitantly, with her free hand.

“East,” he said, nodding. “I am seeking the trail of lost travelers who may have passed this way, so I may not go directly to one place or another. But I will, in the end, turn east again, to my home in Rivendell, where you would be welcome. You would be safe traveling with me: the Riders fear me, and I know this country well.”

Mallory frowned. If she went with him, she’d meet the hobbits. That would change the story for sure – they’d hardly be able to miss the teenaged girl riding with Glorfindel. And there would be Nazgûl at the Ford, though they’d be chasing after Frodo.

But he was right. If the Nazgûl really wanted her, she’d be safer with him than anywhere else, not to mention this would solve the problem of following the trail to the Last Homely house. If she remembered the story correctly, the Black Riders would have plenty of time to catch her before they were forced to regroup to chase down Frodo. And God – Eru, rather – knew what they’d do to her.

Actually, Glorfindel probably knew, too. That was why he was asking her to come with him. She was being “come with me if you want to live”-d. The thought of him as the Terminator was funny, in an awful kind of way.

He let her hand fall. She wiggled her fingers, relieved. “Will you come with me to Rivendell?” he asked. “Or were you going that way already?”

She nodded.

“Then it is decided. But you still have not told me your name.”

She looked away. Again, she didn’t want to make it real. She didn’t want to put herself into this story, even if everything pushed her that way.

“Then I will call you Silent Rider,” he said, sounding amused. There was a strange change in his words when he said _Silent Rider_. It was a moment before it clicked in Mallory’s head that he had probably said it in Sindarin or Quenya rather than Westron. “Can you stand?”

It took some effort, but she managed to pull herself up. She didn’t feel like she was going to fall over again, either.

“Then you can ride.”

_That_ was different. He didn’t know how last night had been. She was awake right now, but she didn’t think that could last all day, and judging from the few pages with him from “Flight to the Ford”, he was probably going to go until she literally fell out of her saddle again. And, oh God, when she did sleep, she might have a panic attack. Unlikely, considering she’d already had one today, but the rules had already been broken, so who knew what would happen next? Anyway, if it wasn’t tonight, it would be another night. There were more than enough days left to guarantee that it would happen eventually, and she wasn’t sure whether Elves slept at all, so he might be awake to see her.

“I understand that you have not fully recovered,” he said kindly. “But we must get back to the Road. Are you in need of food or water?”

She shook her head. She hadn’t eaten that morning, though. She’d have to, soon.

“Do you need to relieve yourself, then, while we are here?”

She blushed and froze, horrified that he’d asked. Why, though? She asked teachers if she could go to the bathroom all the time.

“Step behind a tree,” he said. “And I will look away.”

He not only turned around but took a pair of reins in each hand and led the horses away, too. Mallory almost laughed, but now that she thought of it, didn’t she find Kaza looking for something to eat every time she came back from “relieving herself”?

It didn’t look like there was going to be anything she could properly hide behind. She walked away from them for a minute or two, trying to get enough distance that she didn’t feel like she was going in public.

“That’s far enough,” he called, just at the right volume for her to hear without carrying through the woods.

She looked back, alarmed. But all three of them were still turned purposefully in the opposite direction. The way elf-ears worked, he could probably hear her walking through the leaves. Which meant he’d also be able to hear her pee.

_That’s his problem,_ she told herself. If he wanted her to stay in range where he could hear her, he could go ahead and deal with that.

But it sure _felt_ like her problem.

She moved behind a tree, turned her back to them, and took care of things as quickly as she possibly could. Then, she hurried back to the horses.

Glorfindel mounted Asfaloth when he heard her coming. “Come,” he said. “We have a long way to go.”

_Miles to go before I sleep,_ she thought. She mounted up, and Asfaloth stepped forward, leading the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Glorfindel’s prayer to Este (the Vala of healing) is by Kattungefisk, written with her usual attention to detail (it rhymes in Quenya).
> 
> 2) One day, one of the two of us will come up with better wording for Glorfindel's threat to the Ringwraiths.
> 
> 3) One weird thing I’ve found is that that if you look up “do elves have pointed ears”, everyone says this is an endless debate on par with “do balrogs have wings”, and yet, I’ve never seen a single fanfic that showed elves WITHOUT pointy ears. There’s circumstantial evidence they aren’t: it’s never mentioned, even when the characters are trying to determine someone’s race, and elves and Men are sometimes mistaken for each other. Besides, how would that work with half-elves or Lúthien or Tuor?
> 
> 4) Also, remember that elves and Men are canonically the same species. Of course, this doesn’t mean we look alike, since hobbits are said to be even closer to Men than elves are (culturally or physically?), and look at them. I’m pretty sure I heard they might have been descended from Men, so they’re the same species, too. I’m not so sure about dwarves, who were created by Aule but then adopted by Eru. (I don’t know where the theory came from that hobbits were created by Yavanna, by the way. The Silmarillion said she sent spirits into plants and animals, but that’s SPIRITS, not whole new species. Ents are just spirits put into trees, not whole new types of trees. Also, the purpose of Yavanna’s spirits is to strike back when nature is destroyed. Ents do that, but hobbits are farmers. They dig holes in hills and build hedges, then burn trees that come too close to that hedge. The Old Forest LOATHES them. They are not Yavanna’s defenders.) And you know what? Now that I’ve written it, I think I actually like elves BETTER with normal ears. I did not expect that.
> 
> 5) I’ve always been annoyed at depictions of golden hair in movies. It’s always either shown as plain brown or very pale blond. When I read golden hair for Glorfindel, Galadriel, and the Vanyar, I think GOLD, as in the metal. That’s a darker, yellower color, not pale whitish yellow like, say, Legolas. I like this picture for showing the difference between “gold” and plain blond hair: <https://www.deviantart.com/alystraea/art/When-Eowyn-met-Glorfindel-650855453> It’s also attached to a fic, <https://archiveofourown.org/works/5328218/chapters/12302591>, which is my favorite Glorfindel fic in existence, and I’m literally writing a Glorfindel fic right now. Go read it.
> 
> 6) Side note that probably doesn’t actually change anything: Glorfindel and the Ringwraiths can 100% see each other. Presumably, they look the same way they did to Frodo on Weathertop and at the Ford: Glorfindel as a figure of shining white light and the Ringwraiths as pale men wearing grey robes and helms.
> 
> Beta by Xrai


	10. 9: Rescued

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Glorfindel and Mallory try to figure each other out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rochondín = Silent Rider  
> Periannath = halflings, i.e., hobbits

_**October 14** _

Glorfindel watched Rochondín, the Silent Rider, carefully. The girl (for something about her struck him as terribly young, like a Dúnadan who had reached her adult height but not the age of majority) was a mystery to him. It was rare for anyone other than seasoned warriors to travel alone, and she was certainly not that. Nonetheless, she clearly had a home and someone who cared for her, or barring that, at least a fair amount of money. She wore well-fitting and practical clothes, and her boots appeared new. She claimed that she did not need any food, and she had plenty of water. So why, then, did she have no companions in her journey?

Equally mysterious was the question of her origins. She was dark-haired and fair-skinned, like one of the northern Dúnedain, but she did not have their height or build. Her earrings further marked her as foreign. Glorfindel tried not to look at them too hard, since he knew they went through her flesh, and it disturbed him to see it. One could find piercings in various cultures, but Glorfindel associated them most with the enemy Haradrim. She did not look like one of them, however, and she was traveling from the wrong direction. Besides, there was nothing evil about her, only strange.

He spoke a little to her horse – Swift-foot, as he understood the name – during a brief rest in the afternoon, waiting for her to come back from relieving herself. (He had seen in her face that she was upset when he reminded her not to walk too far, but he could not help paying attention: even if he did not intentionally listen to her steps, it was important for him to hear all movement around him.) The gelding would only speak of his hatred of the black horses and their riders and his sense that he had failed to protect his rider from them. Glorfindel reassured him that he had most likely saved her life. In any case, no ordinary mount could be expected to outrun the Nine’s horses.

He wondered whether Rochondín herself knew what they had wanted with her. If she did, she did not seem likely to tell him. Nonetheless, they would have several days together, and perhaps he could learn something about her. If he could not, Elrond might have more luck. The master of Imladris had spent his life talking to all kinds of people, and he was most likely the person that she had traveled to see. But he would have to find the _periannath_ , or receive some word of their safety, before he could go home. He did not expect to be able to pass her on to anyone else, even if he had the good fortune to meet a group of rangers. He could not expect one or two men, quite likely traveling with their families as many of the rangers did, to fight úlairi on their own. Their safety would rely entirely on stealth, with her in their midst. And he did not expect to meet any other of Imladris’ scouts.

He disliked the complications the girl brought, but he could not leave her behind. He would have to do whatever he could despite her presence.

* * *

They were going the wrong way. Mallory knew they would turn around soon enough – they would have to, if they were going to find the hobbits – but it still ate at her. They were wasting time.

Glorfindel traveled on foot most of the time, looking on the road and all around him for signs. He noticed and commented on the spots where she’d left or returned to the Road in her escape from the Black Riders. She felt bad for just following along behind him without trying to help, considering she actually, literally knew the future. Or a possible future, anyway. But she realized that she didn’t know where they would meet the hobbits, so even if she _had_ been able to speak to him, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him what to do next. He had to keep searching for tracks on the ground, the slow way.

Which was fine, until, mid-breath, her chest seized up.

 _Not again!_ What had the Nazgûl done to her? Three and a half years of panic attacks and they had never come when she was awake, never twice in a day, and never in front of another person.

Another person. Another _person_. Another person!

Her hands tightened on the reins. _It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. It will end on its own, like it always does._

Glorfindel stopped walking and turned to her, alarmed. The horses stopped with him. “What is it?” he asked. “Did you hear something?”

Okay? No, it was not okay. It was _not_ okay. Her brain was short-circuiting, skipping like a needle on a scratched record, hitting the same thoughts again and again. _Go away, go away, go away._

Glorfindel stood, catlike, on the balls of his feet, looking around for danger.

Nobody had seen this. Kaza didn’t count. Not even Tom and Goldberry had seen this. She couldn’t have someone –

Her brain skipped again.

Couldn’t have someone –

Couldn’t have someone _watch_ her panic.

Bit by bit, Glorfindel relaxed, his muscles unwinding. He stepped towards her, holding out a hand.

She shook her head. He needed to not be there. He needed to go away, to disappear, not to come _closer_.

“They are gone. You are safe.”

She shook her head, more emphatically, and waved at him to leave. He _had_ to leave. He couldn’t – She couldn’t –

He looked confused, but took another step forward.

She waved at him again, desperately. He had to understand, to go away and let her do this alone, to pretend he had never seen.

His hand moved as if he wanted to touch her, but he stopped and put it on the horse’s neck instead. “They are gone,” he repeated softly.

She couldn’t stand it. She threw her leg over the side of the horse and ran.

* * *

He didn’t follow her. Not into the bushes, anyway, where she sat curled up for at least fifteen minutes, digging her nails into her scalp. But she knew he was standing right by her, waiting, refusing to stop watching.

 _I’m going to mess the whole story up,_ she thought as she forced her shaking arms and legs to uncurl. _I’m going to slow him down so he won’t find Frodo._ No, _he_ was going to mess things up. He could have just gone on ahead, searching for the hobbits and leaving her alone, making it easier on both of them. He wasn’t walking quickly. She could have caught up.

_It doesn’t matter who’s to blame here. He’s waiting for me right now, and I have to deal with it, or I’ll slow him down even more._

She didn’t want to move, at first. She’d only made the situation worse by running. Hiding in the bushes, like a baby – or like Sandra, when she was young, whenever she heard anyone yelling at someone. Sometimes, when they were really little, Sandra had dragged Mallory along, trying to protect her. Maybe some part of Mallory still remembered that. It was the only explanation for her literally hiding in a bush.

(Later, Mallory recalled, Sandra had graduated to screaming and hitting, which had finally led to Mom and the school paying attention enough to get her a diagnosis. By fifth grade, she had a behavior plan, meetings with school counselors, and a permanent pass to leave the room whenever she started to panic. That was also around the time she’d started karate, which helped. In a few years, she’d gotten better, though she still had issues taking arguments too seriously. Mallory, on the other hand? Nobody questioned if something was wrong with a student who wasn’t disruptive and got good grades. Mom had always brushed away any mention of her being quiet and withdrawn, saying she’d get better once they had a permanent place to live. And she had, sort of, but she wondered how different her life would be now if her anxiety and selective mutism had been treated at the time like Sandra’s PTSD had.)

She didn’t want to face Glorfindel after this. She was going to look like an idiot – because she _was_ an idiot. He would be angry, and he had the right to be. But the longer she stayed here, the farther behind the hobbits he was going to get. She wished he’d just gone on without her and spared her this pressure. She wished that she hadn’t gone along with him – that she only had herself to worry about.

She had to get up and face the music. She worked her way out of the bushes and took an unsteady step towards Kaza, looking at the ground.

“Do you want to get back on your horse?” Glorfindel asked. His words a little more clipped than usual, but his voice was calm.

She nodded. She reached out for the horse’s reins, then stopped when she saw how much her hand was shaking.

“Let me help you.” He put his hands out to make a platform and indicated for her to step on it. She did, and he picked her up so she could easily swing her leg over.

She put her feet in the stirrups. Kaza stepped around nervously, but once Asfaloth started walking again, he calmed down. Glorfindel walked with one hand on Kaza’s shoulder, silent for a while.

“Do you think that was the first time I have seen that sort of thing?” he asked, just as she was beginning to think she was going to escape a lecture. “I have fought in _wars_. Even Elves have difficulty managing the memories, the fear-floods and dreams. We have enough time in our lives to overcome it, but those of us who cannot do that may die.”

Mallory didn’t have PTSD. Sandra had PTSD. Mallory didn’t have triggers or nightmares or things she had to avoid. She just had the effects of being taught, from her earliest memory, that the world was dangerous and there were people out to get her. And, apparently, it was the same way here, if the Nazgûl could be considered “people”.

“But that was not your first experience of a fear-flood. Possibly not even your second. You would not be so calm now if it was.”

She guessed a _fear-flood_ meant a panic attack the same way people used to call PTSD _shell-shock_. And he was right, of course – her first few times, she had barely slept at all the rest of the night, worrying about what was happening to her. She was rattled now, but mostly just tired. It was easier to manage this when she could go to sleep again afterwards.

“Has this happened in the past? Before the Riders?”

She jerked her head in agreement.

“Often?”

She didn’t know what was defined as _often_ , so she shrugged.

“Often enough, I suppose,” he said. “If it happens again, you cannot run like that. You may injure yourself, or become lost, or run into danger. Besides which, I do not have the time to follow you or wait for you to come back. Stay on your horse and stay with me. He will follow Asfaloth even if you cannot guide him.”

By now, she knew that she would probably be able to stay on Kaza during a panic attack. But Glorfindel didn’t understand that she didn’t want him to be there. Didn’t want his help. She didn’t know how to communicate that, and if she stopped again, and he stopped with her, she would be keeping him from finding the hobbits, and…

They walked on in silence.

* * *

The panic attack had taken away what little energy she had left. Glorfindel – who was still walking at Kaza’s side – didn’t talk much when he was looking for tracks, so Mallory sat without much to think about other than how awful she felt, both physically and emotionally. She felt guilty and embarrassed, her legs ached from riding, and her hands were still cold. She just wanted to sleep. Fortunately, just when she started to think she couldn’t stand it anymore, Glorfindel stopped. “This is a good enough place to camp,” he said, his voice light and friendly again. “You are both weary, and Asfaloth will not object to a rest.”

She wondered how long he would have gone on his own. She’d already taken time from him. But what could she do about it? Run away again, for real this time, and let herself die when the Ringwraiths found her? Maybe that was why she wasn’t part of the book – just because she met Glorfindel didn’t mean she’d be with him when he met Aragorn and the hobbits.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered to Kaza as she took off his tack. “This is wrong.”

Kaza nickered.

She petted his neck, combing out his mane. “I’m sorry for running away. It had nothing to do with you. You know, the Black Riders would have taken me if it wasn’t for you. Thank you.”

He seemed to agree, but he decided to go over to Asfaloth instead of staying with her. Mallory went off again to pee. She was just going to have to pretend that Glorfindel couldn’t hear, although she wasn’t happy about it.

She took a few crackers and a handful of dried berries out of her saddlebags on the way back. Glorfindel was building a fire. She was going to have fire tonight! Thank God. “So you do speak,” he said, looking up. “I had begun to wonder.”

Oh, no. He was one of _them_. The first time she’d heard _Oh my God, you can talk?!_ from someone had been in second grade. She’d gone home and cried for so long that Sandra (who had just gotten into her “flamboyantly gay” phase and couldn’t understand why she would cry over such a minor insult, not to mention how anyone could talk so little) had to call Mom at work to ask for help. It had happened at least once a school year since then, and she detested it.

“Forgive me,” he said, and he actually looked like he was actually sorry. “That was impolite. But I had hoped you would tell me something of who you are.”

Mallory pressed her lips together. She wondered what she would have wanted to tell him if she _had_ been able to speak. Well, she was supposed to tell the Elves she’d come from Tom Bombadil. And there was the message for Gandalf. Should she say it now? What if she didn’t make it to him?

No. She wasn’t going to think of that. She would keep the message to herself and wait for the right person to say it to. But maybe it was time to use the name. She sat down, took a deep breath, and pointed west. “Iarwain Ben-Adar,” she said.

“Iarwain Ben-Adar,” he repeated in surprise. “Did he send you this way?”

She nodded and took a bite out of a cracker. It didn’t taste like much. She followed it with some berries, which were much better.

“I have heard of him, but not in a long time, even as we count the years. Forces are moving now that had been sleeping, or hiding, for an age or more.”

He stopped, waiting for her to say more. Finally, he said, “Eat, and then rest. I will keep watch.”

He sang, apparently to himself, while she ate her food. Clearly, Elvish voices were made for singing, and it was beautiful. But listening to it was as confusing as reading Westron had been. She was trying to put together the meaning, the rhythm, and the rhyme all at once. Unlike the written words, though, the translation did eventually settle on something that seemed roughly correct.

_“Ah! once were the two trees_

_of Valinor standing bright and strong_

_Yavanna sang them sweetly,_

_her voice unwavering_

_as they grew from Ezellohar tall_

_“Who now remembers the light of Valinor?_

_“Deep in the woods of Arda_

_two trees stand in the deep green glades_

_One’s roots dig to the earth’s heart_

_One’s boughs touch the bright stars_

_as they climb ever high and with might_

_“Who now remembers the kingdoms of Noldor?_

_“Two trees in a courtyard old_

_with a withered bark and twisted branch_

_whisper the lost names of the Elves_

_the city’s eld wardens_

_as they crumble to ashes and dust_

_“Who now remembers fair fallen Gondolin?”_

Chills ran through Mallory as she realized that she could actually remember all of this: the Trees, the Noldor realms, Gondolin. But on a much more mundane level, she couldn’t help thinking of her own home. Could she really believe that she would go back someday? Or had she left Mom and Sandra and the modern world behind forever, for her to remember the way that he remembered Gondolin?

God, she thought as the song and melancholic feeling faded away, Mom would be horrified if she knew the situation that Mallory was in tonight. Falling asleep, alone, in front of a man she didn’t even know?

No, that was ridiculous. He was an Elf. He wouldn’t do anything to her. Besides, he was trying his best not to embarrass her, even if he was failing miserably at that. Maybe Mom would think this was like Dad, instead. She had been raped in college, and her parents, who were even less enlightened than her, had told her it was her fault. Dad, on the other hand, made sure she was safe and kept other men away from her. And that was fine, until she realized that he sort-of thought it was her own fault, too, and that all his strength and possessiveness could be turned against her when she did something he didn’t like. Glorfindel was Mallory’s rescuer, and so Mom would be cautious of him. That wasn’t entirely insane, but… well… she _wanted_ to be able to trust him. She didn’t have another _choice_ but to trust him. And it would only be a few days.

She didn’t have the energy to debate an imaginary Mom, or to eat more than two crackers. She finished them, then pulled out her blanket, and lay down, the fire at her back. And that was the last thing she remembered doing for the rest of the night.

* * *

Rhochondín lay on her side, legs curled close to her body and one hand clutching her blanket. The horses were sleeping as well, Swift-foot lying on his side and Asfaloth standing over him. He would have been forced to halt to allow Asfaloth to rest even had he not met the girl. He had pushed the white horse hard the first two days, riding to the Bridge of Mitheithel with hardly any rest, and he could not do that again. He needed the horse to be able to run when battle came again, as it surely would. But they would need to be up again before the sun rose.

There was no question of sharing watches: he did not require sleep, and she needed to take as many hours as he could give her. But nonetheless, he was not immune to feeling tired. He sat facing the road and let his mind drift, instead. Danger, if it came, would intrude into his dreams, and the horses would wake if anything threatened them. Still, this gave him some amount of rest.

The night passed peacefully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) There are several possible translations of “Silent Rider” into Sindarin. I just chose the one I liked best.
> 
> 2) úlairi is Quenya for Ringwraiths. The Ringwraiths probably have more names than any other thing or person in Lord of the Rings, and that’s saying something. Oddly enough, though, we don’t have a Sindarin name for them. Instead, we have a Quenya one and a Black Speech one, Nazgûl. This is especially weird because Quenya wasn’t spoken as a daily language in Middle Earth by the time the Ringwraiths appeared, and there aren’t any other Black Speech words that are commonly used. The movies use “ulaer”, which seems very likely as a Sindarin version of the Quenya word, but I don’t feel super comfortable with it. In the books, Glorfindel refers to them (in Westron) as “the Nine”, “servants of Sauron”, and “the enemy”. His first language was Quenya, though, so him calling them úlairi makes sense.
> 
> 3) Do elves wear earrings? I don’t think so. It seems like with all the talk about rings, necklaces, circlets, pins, etc. you’d hear about earrings if they existed. (Then again, I also don’t remember ever hearing about bracelets, either.) Personally, I can’t see elves (or at least high elves) engaging in any sort of body modification at all. I have no clue if the Men in northwestern Middle Earth wear earrings, though. I just wanted something about her that creeps Glorfindel out – it’s only fair.
> 
> 4) I don’t think Glorfindel literally speaks Horse or anything, by the way. It’s just, if Legolas could get a feeling for the thoughts of the rocks in Eregion, Glorfindel can definitely get a sense of what’s on Kaza’s mind.
> 
> 5) Both Kattungefisk and I felt like the word “panic attack” seemed too modern for Glorfindel to say, so we came up with “fear-flood”, approximately “daelo” in Sindarin.
> 
> 6) Poetry by Kattungefisk again. Double kudos to her for writing part of it in Quenya to make sure it rhymed in the original language!
> 
> 7) Now for the real stuff. Legolas is said to sleep with his eyes open, but that isn’t necessarily how elves always sleep – we don’t really know what they do when they’re home and safe. This is what I’m going with: Elves can go without sleep for several days. (They’re shown staying up late almost every time we meet them.) When they do sleep, it is only for a few hours. They can alternatively go into a sort of waking dream where they are aware of what is happening around them. This lets them be partially on watch or otherwise functioning while still resting their minds. Also, it lets them go without proper sleep for much longer. Glorfindel isn’t willing to sleep on the road, but he can rest to make it easier on himself while still staying alert for danger.
> 
> 8) Weirdly enough, according to what I’ve read, horses seem to do something similar – they sleep on their feet most nights, which isn’t as restful but is safer for them. They need to lie down and have REM sleep every so often. If they’re around other horses, they’ll trade off who stands and who lies down.
> 
> Beta by Xrai


	11. 10: Elvish Poetry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Glorfindel figures out the language situation.

_**October 15** _

Someone was shaking Mallory’s shoulder. Why was someone in her room? She turned to look, confused.

Glorfindel. He looked eerie in the darkness, no color to be seen except the glowing embers of a fire behind him and the bright blue of his eyes. “Wake up,” he whispered.

She shook her head. She was cold, and still tired, and everything ached, and her hands were freezing. Was this how the hobbits would feel when they traveled to Mordor? She remembered being amazed and horrified at their endurance as the story went on. But her journey wasn’t like the things Frodo and Sam had suffered. Not yet.

“We cannot stay in one place for long. Here.”

Glorfindel offered her some more of the miruvor. She took that without arguing. Then, he handed over her waterskin, and she drank some of that. She felt more awake, but still pretty miserable. She rubbed her hands together to bring back some warmth.

“Are they cold again?” he asked. He touched the back of one hand and frowned. Encouraging.

 _I’m doing this for the hobbits,_ she thought, pulling herself up to her feet. _I’m going on so he can get to the hobbits._ Bathroom first, then food. She had to eat something after how little she’d had yesterday. “Morning,” she whispered to Kaza, who watched her with interest while she got out a piece of dried meat from her saddlebags. “I hope you’re not too tired. You’ll be the one walking, after all.”

He went off to find something of his own to eat, and she went to sit by the embers of the fire.

“He seems very fond of you,” said Glorfindel, who was eating a bit of a flatbread – _lembas_?

Mallory nodded, trying to look at his bread without being obvious.

“He is an excellent horse,” he went on. “But considering you are of the race of Men, I cannot imagine that he makes good conversation.”

He made exactly the right amount of conversation, in Mallory’s opinion. Would he have made more if she had been an Elf?

Glorfindel took out a comb and ran it through his hair. It was encouraging to see that he did have to do _something_ to it to keep it so nice, but on the other hand, he didn’t seem to be having any trouble with tangles. Mallory really wanted to get some Elvish conditioner. “But he understands you, I think, and I do not,” he went on.

Elf ears. She was going to have to get used to the fact that he could hear literally everything. She sat down and tore off a piece of dried meat. She wasn’t hungry, but she knew she should have been absolutely starving, so she was going to have to eat.

“I find that odd, because I know very many languages, some not spoken in this world for ages of time,” he added. “But I have never heard yours.”

Great. She chewed, slowly. The meat was tough and not very appetizing, but she didn’t have many options left.

“Silent Rider,” he said.

Right, that was her name now. She looked up, frowning.

“You understand me, but you will not speak, and the words that you do say are ones that I do not recognize.” He tilted his head to the side and gazed at her thoughtfully. She looked away from the intensity of his eyes, her skin crawling. “I think I understand it, or some of it, at least. You do not speak Westron at all, do you?”

She shook her head and tore off another bite of meat.

“What, then? Have you studied it?”

She kept chewing and didn’t respond.

“What is your language, then? Do you speak Rohirric? I know some of this language.”

She shook her head.

He frowned, though more in confusion than distrust. “But you understand it well enough.”

 _You understand it?_ Oh, no. Oh, God. He hadn’t just spoken to her in Rohirric, had he? At least she could tell the difference between Westron and Sindarin, based on the sound of the words. She hadn’t noticed him changing between these two languages at all.

“Do you understand me now?”

That sounded like Sindarin. She could try to pretend she only understood Westron and Rohirric, but if he spoke to her in other languages frequently, he’d catch her eventually. She couldn’t even successfully lie to her mother, let alone a powerful Elf-lord who had probably slain a balrog. (Maybe he wasn’t the same Glorfindel as Tolkien’s favorite balrog-slayer, but considering the song about Gondolin last night and her dream, that didn’t seem likely.) So she nodded, cautiously.

“I do not suppose you speak any of these languages yourself, do you?

He was getting it now. She shook her head and forced herself to swallow the meat she was chewing on.

“How does this work?”

She shrugged uncomfortably, twisting her earrings.

“I do not think you know the answer any more than I do.”

Yup, he got it.

“Then it will not help for _me_ to speak. You should say something and let me see if any words are familiar to me.”

She frowned.

“Why not? Is your language secret?”

She pressed her lips together. It sort of was, actually. If she was literally in the book, she didn’t have to worry about languages – Tolkien hadn’t even fully written out his own languages, let alone the language of the weird teenager tagging along with Glorfindel – but if it was real, she didn’t want there to be a record of English in this world.

“Very well, then,” he said when she didn’t answer. “I shall speak and you shall listen – in whatever language I want, I suppose.” He smiled. “But can you at least give me your name?”

Mallory hesitated. She still didn’t want to say it, but he probably already had an idea of what English sounded like, so it wasn’t giving too much away. “Mallory,” she said at last, the word coming out in a rush before she could think better of it.

He paused a moment, clearly confused. “Mel-a-ee?” he attempted.

She looked at him.

“Again,” he said.

“ _Mallory_ ,” she repeated, more slowly this time.

“Mel-ow-ee?”

She snorted with laughter. An ancient Elf-lord, thousands of years old, and he couldn’t say his _r_ ’s. But she shouldn’t be surprised. Between Lord of the Rings and Spanish class, she knew just enough linguistics to realize that the English _r_ was a very rare sound. Maybe she could do better. She was still saying her name too quickly. “Mal-lor-y,” she said, drawing it out and being careful to get every sound right.

“Melody?” he said, or something like _Melody_ , heavily accented.

She shook her head.

“Perhaps I should keep to Silent Rider for now,” he said, sighing. “If you cannot finish your food now, take it with you and finish it in the saddle. You need not eat something you cannot stomach.”

He was right. She felt like she had the time that she’d gotten the flu and had a high fever and hadn’t wanted to eat for days. Only, she had the opposite of a fever now: she was cold. She put it down and took out her own comb to work on her hair. It was badly tangled because she hadn’t fixed it since… the night before last, she thought. It was filthy, and she did not have the patience to pick it apart.

Glorfindel watched her for a minute or two. Then, he began, “I do not know what your customs are.” He sounded nervous, and she looked up at him, worried. “But I could be of some assistance, perhaps?”

Mallory tried very, very hard not to start laughing as all of the Legolas/Gimli hair-braiding fics she’d ever read ran through her head. Shame they were on the road and couldn’t end up somewhere where There Was Only One Bed. (And that he was a reborn balrog-slayer who couldn’t say his r’s and she was an aromantic-asexual high schooler with social anxiety, but other than her being underage, she’d seen worse pairings than that.) More reasonably, she wasn’t a big fan of the idea of him having his hands in her hair, but it was better than doing this. So she nodded at him, then went to her saddlebags to pull out the hairpins, which were still stuck to her shirt.

“Ah,” he said when he saw them. “That will help. Would you prefer a style that will stay in over several days?”

She nodded and sat down, and he moved behind her. He worked quickly, his fingers moving deftly through the tangles and then pulling her hair into place, working in a circle around her head. He didn’t use her hairtie, so she put it back around her wrist. “There,” he said only a few moments later. “Will that serve?”

She felt her hair. He had done a French braid and pinned up the tail, like Goldberry, but he had done the braid in a circle around her head – a crown braid, she thought it was called. It included all of her hair and didn’t create a part. Basically, it was exactly what she needed. She nodded.

“Good. We should leave.”

She rolled up her blanket and put the saddle and bridle back on Kaza. It must be nice to take off his “clothes” for a while, she thought. She should change hers to the cleaner set soon. She took a couple of pieces of dried apple – she only had enough fruit for one more meal after this – and ate that. But she did hang onto the meat so she could work on it throughout the day, as he had suggested.

“I suspect that if those I seek traveled this way, they have left the Road,” said Glorfindel as he buried the fire. “They may have already passed us. But they can only cross the Greyflood at the Last Bridge, so we will go there.”

Traveling east? Good. She remembered that Glorfindel had come from behind the party, so they had, in fact, passed him by in one of Aragorn’s “shortcuts”. Of course, Glorfindel didn’t know Aragorn was with them, did he? Well, she wasn’t about to let him in on that.

Glorfindel mounted Asfaloth. He was even more insanely tall on horseback, looking down on her and Kaza, who was himself a solid foot shorter than Asfaloth. “Stay next to me,” he said. “I want to be able to see you.”

Mallory was a bit irritated at that, but Kaza happily walked alongside the other horse. They rode in silence, Glorfindel alert for sounds or signs of the hobbits – or danger.

The sun rose higher in the sky, and Mallory looked at the scenery. It was hilly here, and pretty. But it occurred to her that she’d ridden this stretch of Road three times now.

_We’re going to the Bridge. This is the right thing to do._

She could reassure her brain, but her body had other plans. Suddenly, as if she’d been punched in the stomach, her lungs wouldn’t expand.

No! Why was this happening again? With _Glorfindel_ –

He looked at her.

 _No!_ No, no, no. She shook her head and pulled on Kaza’s reins. She could at least get behind him. Kaza paused, then took another step. She pulled a little harder, trying to tell him what she wanted without hurting him. He tossed his head in annoyance and pulled forward.

“Stay with me,” said Glorfindel. “You will be all right.”

No. She wanted him to go away. Why wouldn’t he go away?

_But I have to go on, because he’ll stop and wait with me, and he won't even stop watching me while he does it, and then he won’t be able to find Frodo, and –_

She couldn’t take this kind of pressure. She wasn’t the right person to choose to do whatever it was she was supposed to do. She had _never_ been the right person. She couldn’t handle Black Riders. She wasn’t an adventurer. She couldn't even cope with her own panic attacks. She just wanted to leave. Leave Glorfindel and this entire situation. Whatever would happen to her on her own, without fire, without protection, at least it was better than risking Frodo’s life and the Ring’s safety.

Glorfindel had stopped Asfaloth, so Kaza wasn’t still fighting to keep up with them, but when she started to dismount, he stepped to the side to throw her off balance and keep her on.

 _Please,_ she begged Glorfindel silently. _Go and just leave me alone. Let me deal with this the way I know how to deal._

“He will follow me if you let him.”

She shook her head and waved at him to leave.

He looked down at her, with his blue eyes, and a thousand alarm bells went off in her mind – he’s too tall, he’s not human, he’s _looking at me_. She shut her eyes to make the clamor of _wrong wrong wrong_ go away. Then, all she had was her heartbeat echoing in her ears and her lungs fighting to work.

“Let me help you,” he said, almost pleading.

She didn’t _want_ help. She wanted to be _alone_. She clenched her hands around the reins until her nails, which hadn’t been cut since Goldberry had trimmed them with a knife during her last evening there, dug into her palms.

He was standing close to her, she realized. She opened her eyes to see that he had dismounted. “Come with me,” he said, in a voice that told her it was an order, not an offer.

She shook her head, even though she knew it was useless.

He walked over to her and put a hand on Kaza’s neck. “Walk,” he said. His voice was stern – he was angry at her. That made her chest seize up even more. She was always the one who didn’t get in trouble and didn’t get scolded by adults. She wanted to apologize, but she couldn’t do that, either, and besides, she still wanted him to _go away_! Why couldn’t she be in bed? Why couldn’t she be lying down, safe?

Kaza took a step, fighting against the pressure of her reins. “He wants to walk,” Glorfindel said. “You can feel that.”

She didn’t loosen the reins. Kaza was caught between Glorfindel’s words and Mallory’s hands, and she could feel how upset he was. But she didn’t want to go forward. And she wasn’t going to let Glorfindel use Kaza to manipulate her into it.

He didn’t say anything else. Once it was obvious she wasn’t giving in, he pulled her hands off the reins. Then, Kaza walked forward, happily, alongside Asfaloth. Mallory just sat on his back, her hands clenched into empty fists, helpless and terrified and angry. She couldn't dismount a moving horse, and she didn't _want_ to run away again, and even if she tried, Glorfindel was right there to stop her.

He was silent until she calmed down. It took a long time, but eventually, the panic faded and she just had to deal with being intensely frustrated at both herself and him. She'd been an idiot, just like last time. But if he had just left her alone…

“Silent Rider, listen to me,” he said at last.

 _Mallory,_ she wanted to say, but she didn’t.

“You cannot run when this happens. It puts you in danger. Do you understand that?”

She gritted her teeth and pressed her lips together. Yes, she understood. The question was whether _he_ understood _her_. And the answer was that he didn't. She knew that.

“Will it help, next time, if I do not speak to you?”

She nodded, her jaw still tense.

“Then I will not. But, in return, you must stay with me.”

She frowned.

“Silent Rider, I need you to understand this. The Road is not safe for lone travelers. I do not want you to fall behind.”

Why couldn’t she drop back for just a few minutes? Was it because she was a girl, or a teenager? Sixteen-year-olds used to be considered adults, right? Tom Bombadil thought it was okay for her to be on her own. And she’d been doing fine before the Ringwraiths showed up.

She needed to be nicer: the Nazgûl were the real problem here, not Glorfindel. But she wished she could just get him to understand that he was the first person to see her like this, and she didn’t know how to deal with it. No, she didn’t want him to talk to her. But she didn’t want him to look at her, either. She had coping mechanisms, but not for this.

“Stay where I can see you,” he said. “Asfaloth, halt.”

Both of the horses stopped. Glorfindel mounted and told his horse to walk, and both of them did.

She took a deep breath. She’d just been scolded by Glorfindel, she realized. Glorfindel! And she was sitting here, thinking about how angry she was at a _book character_ who was trying to rescue her from freaking _Nazgûl_. This was weird. This was beyond weird. There weren’t even words for how weird this was.

She almost managed to laugh.

* * *

They stopped in the afternoon, mostly so Mallory could pee. She never forgot how cold she was, but sometimes she forgot that it wasn’t a matter of being underdressed for the weather. Trying to undo and redo the lacings on her leggings with half-numb fingers reminded her of what was really going on. She remembered the way Glorfindel had looked at her that morning when he found her hands hadn’t improved.

 _I’m dying,_ she thought again, and this time, she was scared.

* * *

Glorfindel waited until the last hint of the sun’s light had disappeared to make camp that night. Rochondín clearly would have liked to stop several hours earlier, though, as seemed to be her way, she did not protest. As she took off her horse’s tack, he was very concerned to see that she still appeared to have trouble using her hands.

Glorfindel had some small skill in medicine. He could stitch and dress a wound or splint a broken bone, and he could say what medicine to give for fever or nausea, though not how much to use or what to mix it with. And he had power against the Nine.

The girl had not been wounded by them, cut by one of their cold knives. If she had, she would have been beyond his help. And she had not departed from her body to wander in darkness, though he thought he might have been able to call her back if she had. He should have been able to heal her, and yet he could not.

Rochondín needed rest and a sense of safety, and she could have neither in the wild. He knew full well how exhausting fears-floods were, and even if she allowed him to help, he would only be able to ease her suffering, not prevent them from occurring at all. And perhaps her dark mood simply prevented her from seeing that she could get better.

She would recover if she reached Imladris. There were healers in Elrond’s house who had the knowledge of how to help her. And she would find it far easier to manage her anxiety and depression after even a few days in the peace and clear air of the valley. He had only to bring her there, if he could.

Fortunately, not all of the signs were bad. Rochondín appeared to be hungry, and though she was weary, her mood seemed to have improved. He was in good spirits, himself – knowing that he had nowhere to go and nobody to find for the next several hours was a relief to him. He found himself interested in testing the limits of the girl’s comprehension. He had learned in their conversation that morning that she understood Westron, Rohirric, Sindarin, and Quenya, but even Quenya was a living language, still spoken on occasion in Middle Earth and regularly across the Sea. He could speak other languages that were not; for example, Adûnaic. Once the common language of Númenor, it had long since died out in favor of Westron.

“Do you understand what I am saying?” he asked, stretching out his legs on his side of the fire.

The girl nodded.

“That sentence may have been too close to Westron,” he continued in the same language. “I ought to use more words to test you. But you still understand, do you not?”

She nodded, frowning at him in obvious annoyance.

He grinned. This was rather entertaining. The freedom to use Sindarin or Quenya as he pleased was enjoyable by itself, but the idea that she might know every language that had ever existed seemed to him to make an excellent game. He sang a few verses of song in the old Silvan language, which was no longer commonly spoken, but whose influences could be heard in the Sindarin dialect used by the Wood-elves. 

_“A spider creeping in his web_

_Twisted anew his silver thread_

_He earns his meal with his craft_

_Should one err along his path._

_“Spider’s coin is shining moon_

_He’s rich with silver, diamonds too_

_But gold slips through spider’s grasp_

_Out of shadow he cannot last._

_“Clothed in silk the spider lies_

_He waits, he stirs, he hungers, sighs_

_But spider feasts on flesh and meat_

_Come his way, he’ll have a treat!”_

“What about that?” he asked. He had not practiced speaking Silvan aloud for quite some time, and he enjoyed the feel of it on his tongue

She wiggled her hand.

Odd: that was not a gesture she had used before. It was neither yes nor no, but shrugged shoulders seemed to mean _maybe_ , so it was not that, either. “Somewhat?” he suggested.

She nodded.

“Are songs more difficult?”

She nodded.

That was a disappointment, but he was not finished. There were no more languages he could call himself fluent in, but he knew a few words of Khuzdul, Haradric, and some ancient Mannish languages, as well as enough of Dunlendish to manage if he had a need to use it.

“Dunlendish!” he said, considering a sentence he could attempt. “I greet you. Where is the river?” He searched his memory for more words. “You are eating.”

She looked somewhat confused.

“Did you not understand?” he asked, returning to Sindarin.

She nodded.

“You did?”

She nodded again.

Good: her confusion must have been only that his words did not follow from the conversation. “Do you hear the words as if they were in your own language?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Then you understand what each word means.”

She nodded.

“If you learn to speak one of our languages, you will be quite a translator. Imagine, a Man who knows more languages than an Elf!”

She frowned at him again, but he laughed. He tried his words of Haradric, then Khudzul. She seemed to comprehend both, though she clearly did not appreciate the odd collection of words being said to her. Khuzdul was as obscure a language he could think of, kept secret by the dwarves, and yet she understood even that. (Of course, the words he had spoken to her were known by others. Perhaps if a dwarf spoke to her with words that had never been shared with Elves, it would be different, but if not – how valuable a power like this could be to Elrond and the lore-keepers in Imladris!)

“Do you know how to read in your own language?” he asked.

She nodded.

“And are you able to translate writing in the same way?” he asked.

She shook her head.

Ah, well. He considered whether there was any other language worth attempting, and he found one. He had once learned a few lines of ancient poetry, older than the languages of Sindarin or Quenya, originating before the Great Migration of Elves towards the West. There were few now who had ever spoken that language, even in the West, as not all of the early generations of Elves had chosen to allow their spirits to be taken into the halls of Mandos, and nearly none at all had been rehoused and returned to walk with living Elves. Those who still survived generally did not remember the language, as their own words had gradually changed into the speech used now. So, he could not fully translate this poetry, though he could recognize a few words, and had been told that it was part of a song about rain.

He spoke the lines out loud, slowly, as astonished as he always was at the age of the words he was saying. There was silence after he finished. The girl looked at him, no longer annoyed. It seemed she had some idea that this meant something to him.

“Did that make sense to you?”

She nodded.

“Then you know something I do not. Perhaps, one day, you may tell me.” He noticed that she had finished her food. “Go on and sleep. I will not trouble you any longer tonight.”

She went to make herself a bed, and he sat in silence, dreaming of his home in the West.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) This chapter is late because, while I’ve probably written more in the past month than in any other month over the past several years, none of this was on this story. (If you recall, I had decided that I had to write 3,000 words in Book III to earn the right to post a chapter.) But I figured I needed a reward for writing so much, so here we are. I wrote and advent calendar at [https://archiveofourown.org/works/27818077/chapters/68103799 ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27818077/chapters/68103799) (also available on Tumblr), and I’m working on a longer advent calendar that I’ll post next year because it’s about my Rivendell OCs that none of you have met yet.
> 
> 2) It literally took me several hours and two baby name books to find a name that I liked but thought the elves would have genuine trouble pronouncing, LOL.
> 
> 3) Just to be clear, there will be no There Was Only One Bed in this fic. That wasn’t ironic foreshadowing or something. Also, that seems to be the sort of trope that people talk about a lot more than they actually write it, which is interesting.
> 
> 4) A crown braid looks like the first hairstyle here: <https://www.schwarzkopf.international/en/hairstyling/summer/summer-hairstyles-for-the-city.html>
> 
> 4) Poetry credit to Kattungefisk.
> 
> 5) I’m pretty sure that dreaming for elves is basically reliving real memories. I’m not sure whether they can choose what they dream or if they have nightmares or flashbacks sometimes.
> 
> Beta by Xrai


	12. 11: The Last Bridge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Glorfindel and Mallory come to an agreement on panic attacks. She finally crosses the Greyflood.

_**October 16** _

Up early again that morning. Mallory struggled through the motions of getting ready for the day. _Adventurer: fueled by miruvor,_ she thought, but even with the drink, she was too tired to smile at her own joke. She wondered if she’d have reached the Last Bridge by now if she’d gone straight. _Doesn’t matter,_ she told herself. _As long as Glorfindel is making the choices he would have made if I wasn’t here._ But she wanted to get to Rivendell as fast as she could. Then again, she would have been going more slowly without him, because she would have actually been letting herself sleep. It probably added up to the same thing.

Kaza seemed to be doing all right, and that was what mattered. He was the one doing the work. So they set out, Kaza obediently walking alongside Asfaloth. Mallory was glad Glorfindel wasn’t paying much attention to her, since she had to be this close to him. Things would be all right, if she didn’t have a panic attack.

If.

_I can’t run away if I do,_ she thought. _No matter how much I want to. He’ll be mad, and I’ll hate myself after._

Which was fine and all when she wasn’t currently panicking. But she knew that wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. When the panic hit, only an hour into the day’s journey, and every atom of her was screaming that everything was wrong and she needed to go somewhere she could be alone, all of that went out the window. She had to be alone. _Had_ to. She knew there was no point in trying to communicate Glorfindel, but Kaza –

Her hands pulled on the reins. They seemed to be making their own decisions. Kaza, though, tried to keep walking. If she could get off his back – if she could go somewhere, anywhere, that she could be alone and hold herself and hide, maybe she’d connect with her body again and be all right. Her hands pulled on the reins. “Stop, stop, stop,” she heard herself whispering. If he would stay still for just thirty seconds, maybe she could get herself down, and she'd be free. But he was struggling to go on. His ears were back, and he snorted in irritation. Something seemed to wrap itself around her chest, squeezing tight. Was she even breathing? Nothing was real.

Asfaloth stopped walking. Glorfindel silently dismounted and pulled a coil of rope from his saddlebags. And Kaza stopped. She didn't realize for a moment, but he stopped. She wasn’t entirely sure whether her body could stand right now, but she hoped it would figure everything out. Her right foot came out of the stirrup.

“No,” Glorfindel said, quietly but emphatically. He put one hand on her leg to stop her from going farther.

Everything was so distant that she wasn't sure whether she was dreaming or awake. She tried to put her foot back, but her body was shaking so hard that it almost couldn’t find the stirrup. _Stupid of me to think I could ever get down if I can’t even get my foot in a stirrup,_ she thought. _Stupid – stupid –_

She felt Glorfindel let go of her leg. She watched him thread the rope through the ring on the right side of Kaza’s bridle and tied it there. Then, holding the other end of the rope, he told the horses to walk.

Mallory’s lungs gasped for breath. The world spun around her. Stupid, getting all wrapped up in –

_Breathe. It’s going to be all right._

She shut her eyes and squeezed the reins. The desire to scream out her pain and frustration rose up in her.

_Breathe. This will pass. This will pass. This will…_

* * *

That panic attack seemed to last forever, but it did, eventually, pass. Glorfindel went back to Asfaloth, looped the other end of the rope around a strap of his bridle, tied it with a slipknot, and mounted again. It irritated Mallory that she was trapped but he could get out of this arrangement with a single tug if he wanted to.

_Don’t be an idiot. He did it that way so he can separate the horses if the Ringwraiths come back and he has to chase them off. It’s sensible._ The problem was him tying the two horses together in the first place. He didn't even think she was capable of making her own decisions.

She considered undoing the knot, but he wasn’t trying to hide that he was keeping an eye on her. Also, her fingers were stiff and halfway numb, and she didn’t want to hurt herself. So she had to content herself with glaring at him.

In the early afternoon, Glorfindel stopped the horses and dismounted to study the ground. He looked up at her, and she was struck again by the brilliant blue of his eyes. No wonder nothing seemed real, with him around. “There are more tracks than I expected,” he said. “But none of them belong to the enemy horses. I hope that they have met with a ranger, or the wizard Mithrandir.”

That was the first time he had mentioned anyone's name, she realized. Naturally, he must have assumed that it wouldn’t mean anything to her to talk about hobbits or the Ring. No, more than that, he was trying to keep the Ring secret from her. She probably knew more about the Ring than he did, but he had no idea. She almost wanted to come out with all the information and see his face when he realized that he'd been trying to hide things she already knew. But that was a secret she had to keep as long as possible, and it wasn't like she could talk, anyway.

Glorfindel undid the rope from Asfaloth’s bridle and held it as he led the way forward. After maybe a half hour of him walking, Mallory could see and hear the river ahead of them. The path down to the river was steep, and at Glorfindel’s suggestion, Mallory dismounted to let Kaza walk down more easily. Glorfindel stood at the bottom of the slope when she started to make her way down, watching anxiously, as if he was worried that she would be too weak to manage it.

Once they reached the stone bridge, Glorfindel said, “Stay here,” as much to the horses as to her. He walked over the bridge, then back, looking pleased. “They have crossed here,” he said. “And I do not think they were followed. Refill your waterskins. I would not bathe here, and it will do nothing good for the cold afflicting you, but I, at least, will wash my hands and face.”

She hadn’t expected him to invite her _not_ to wash. She knew she must smell awful. She didn’t notice it anymore, but another person would, and being an Elf, he probably had a much better nose than her, same as his eyes and ears. Then again, looking down into the fast-moving and apparently deep river, she could see why he didn’t want her to step in. It was opaque with bubbles and suspended dirt, too – her filter cloth was going to be very necessary – but she was running low on water and needed it.

She got back on Kaza, and it wasn’t even as long as a half hour before Glorfindel found the place that the hobbits had left the Road again. “I suppose that is for the better,” he said, but he looked concerned.

_You’ll find them,_ Mallory thought, but there was no way she could help or even reassure him. So they rode on. After a while, it started to rain, and Glorfindel laughed and thanked the skies for waiting. Mallory wondered whether he actually thought that the clouds had waited on purpose to make sure he could see the tracks. She was never entirely sure what Elves could and couldn’t control, and there were also a lot of moments in the books that implied that things were fated to happen the way they did, but she didn’t know how literally to take that.

She pulled up her hood to stay dry, but she still found herself shivering. Glorfindel would give her a concerned look every so often, which only made her more nervous. He was looking at her, in fact, when her heartbeat skipped and her chest seized and she went spinning into panic again.

Twice in a day. Twice in a day _again_. And she was trapped here, and he knew exactly what was happening, and –

Glorfindel abruptly turned away, but that didn’t help. She was intensely aware that there was no option to escape. He had taken that away from her. _That's probably better_ , she told herself. That _was_ better. She couldn’t hurt anyone this way. But she also couldn’t curl up, couldn’t squeeze her arms around her legs, couldn’t do _anything_ to help herself cope.

_Yes, I can. I can breathe. I can –_

She wanted to get out of here. She wanted to go back to her bed. She wanted to go home.

_But what if I woke up back home tomorrow and it didn’t get better? What if I started having panic attacks all the time, even at school?_

She instantly thought of a hundred horrible circumstances. She knew exactly which teachers wouldn’t let her leave the room, and she’d heard the kinds of things kids would say about her. She didn’t think she’d be able to go to school at all if she knew there was a chance of this happening. So… what then? Online school? Would Mom let her do that?

Thinking about things when she was having a panic attack only made things worse. The world was going fuzzy. _Breathe,_ she reminded herself. She listened to Kaza’s hoofbeats, trying to match her breathing to their rhythm. _In, one, two, three; out, one, two, three; in – don’t think – two three; out…_

* * *

They had a brief bathroom break about an hour after that. When Mallory came back, making her way over wet rocks, she found that Glorfindel had untied the rope. He didn’t say anything. In a way, how casually he did that made her even more angry. It was typical abusive behavior to give her back the most basic control over her life as a reward for doing whatever he said. Then again, he wasn’t asking her to be grateful for his “generosity”, like Dad would have done to Mom, and he _had_ made a concession – not looking or talking to her during the last panic attack – which Dad wouldn't have done.

Well, at least this way, she didn’t have to deal with the embarrassment of having tried to run away. Because he was right, she shouldn’t leave. It was just unfair that she was being put into situations where taking care of herself would hurt someone else, and it would be so much easier if…

But that wasn't his fault or hers, and there was nothing she could do.

* * *

Mallory didn’t feel _too_ bad that evening, but the inside of her legs hurt – the skin, not the muscles – which was new. She needed to change clothes, too. She wished she’d done it before the river, so she could have at least rinsed them off, but it was only a few days to Rivendell, so she’d probably be fine. And the river _had_ been dangerous. And there was the rain.

Glorfindel noticed her taking her green outfit out of the saddlebags. “If you intend to put those on, I suggest you do it here, where there is light from the fire and I can help you with your boots,” he said. “I will leave to give you privacy.”

She considered the suggestion, then nodded. The boots weren’t nearly user-friendly enough for the way her hands were working right now, and though there was still some light from the sun, the clouds meant that it wouldn’t last long. He could probably see in the dark, but she couldn’t.

So he knelt down in front of her and unlaced the boots, then helped her pull them off. “Call if you need help,” he said.

She nodded, and he walked off, stopping for a moment to whisper something to the horses. She was amused to notice that they did not look her way after that.

She took off her leggings and looked at her legs. The insides of her thighs were red, irritated from rubbing against the saddle. No wonder, she thought as she pulled the new ones on. She was losing weight from how little she was eating, and neither pair fit right anymore.

_That’s not a bad thing. You could stand to lose some weight,_ Mom would say.

Maybe she could, but not this way. This was because she was literally starving.

_Take what you can get,_ Mom would say.

No. Healthy-losing-weight and starvation-losing-weight were not the same thing. Mallory never argued with Mom over stuff like that, but Sandra did. And then Mom would come up with something about how Sandra didn’t understand because she wasn’t a girl. And then there would be a different problem, and they would go on for hours, and Sandra would end up crying in her room afterwards. It was awful.

She changed her top and bra, but she left her boots off, relieved to give her feet some freedom. They seemed to be doing all right, at least considering she was wearing shoes twenty-four hours a day. Then, she put her old clothes in her saddlebags and got out some food. She’d eaten the last of the dried fruit already. It was just crackers and jerky now.

“Rochondín?” Glorfindel called out. It occurred to her that she wouldn’t have been able to tell him not to come back if she wasn’t done. But she thought he knew what was going on, even if he couldn’t see her. (Also, if she said anything at all, he’d probably take it as a sign that she didn’t want him there, because what else would inspire her to actually talk to him?)

Fortunately, though, she was done. A minute or two later, he walked into the circle of light from the campfire and reached for her boots. She shook her head. He nodded and went to get a piece of his waybread.

They both sat down. “Have you begun to feel better, now that it is dry again?” he asked.

She reached up to turn her earrings while she considered the question, but the sudden touch of her cold fingertips on her warm earlobe only distracted her. And something felt wrong about the earrings, too. They weren’t cold enough. On a normal day, if her hands were this cold, then the gold should have been freezing. But it wasn’t, because the air wasn’t what was making her cold.

He sighed. “I hope that the fire will help,” he said. “And remember, they are far away now.”

Not far enough. But she nodded.

Then, he smiled. “How old are you?” he asked in a more conversational tone.

She gave him the best look she could to express that it was a strange question.

“Come, now. Surely you will not take offense that I cannot guess your age. You are fully grown, but still young, and not married, I think.” He frowned, thinking. “If you were one of the Dúnedain, I would say you must be between fifteen and thirty years old, but as you are not, I can place limits at… thirteen and… twenty-five? Twenty?”

She shook her head, laughing a little. He wasn’t wrong, but he was clearly struggling to come up with even remotely reasonable guesses.

“Tell me, then.”

She held up ten fingers, then closed her hands, then held up another six.

“Sixteen?”

She nodded.

“I suppose a thirteen-year-old would not be alone in the wild. Though I would still like very much to know where you came from.”

She looked down.

“Before Iarwain, I mean.” He paused for an answer, but when she didn’t give one, he asked, “Did you cross the Sea to get here?”

She looked back up. What a strange question. What a strange question from _him_ , someone who _had_ crossed the Sea. Where across the Sea did he think she came from? Not Valinor. Was across the Sea just his concept of the farthest away someone could travel? Or did he think she’d sailed around from the south or something? Then again, if Middle Earth was Europe, then she _was_ from across the Sea, or the equivalent in another world.

He looked at her thoughtfully, waiting for her answer, until the light in his eyes got to her she had to look away again. She shook her head.

He sighed. “Ah, well.” He suddenly had a cheeky tone in his voice. “Do you want to know how old I am?”

She nodded. Now she could learn whether he really was the balrog slayer. A mighty balrog slayer who couldn’t say his r’s. She smiled to herself.

“Older than the sun and moon,” he said. “Older than the race of men.”

Chills ran over her body at his description, and she stopped smiling. This wasn't a joke or a Tumblr discussion about Silmarillion history. He meant his answer entirely literally. He had _actually seen_ the sun and moon rise for the first time. It just underscored how different this world was from hers.

“I was born well over seven thousand years ago and again six thousand years ago. I may be born yet again before the world ends.”

Yup, Gondolin. And oh, God, how old he was. Even in her own world, human civilization was only about six thousand years old, and that was when he’d been _re_ -born. Older than the race of men indeed.

The chills went down her spine again. This world was so ancient, and so strange. And it was all meant to exist in the distant past of her world. Tolkien’s idea was that it had all happened something like six thousand years ago. So if they’d existed in the same world, he’d have been born _thirteen thousand_ years before her. Jesus Christ.

While she was thinking, he said something she missed. She looked up again, questioningly.

“I am the first elf you have met, am I not?” he asked.

She nodded.

He smiled. “You need not fear.”

She looked at him. The hobbits – or at least Sam – trusted Elves implicitly and were always relieved and comforted to see them. They hadn’t known about things like the Silmarils and kinslayings and Rings of Power, of course, but they’d learned about the rings, and that hadn’t changed their opinions. She remembered that Sam hadn’t trusted Aragorn until Glorfindel came along and proved that he was friends with Elves (and, oh God, she was going to _see_ that meeting). But up close and in person, Glorfindel _was_ scary. He was so inhuman while at the same time being entirely human. Yes, it was mostly the strangeness of his eyes, but even when he was looking away from her, she would sometimes glance at him and feel nervous again, doubting her own mind. No other aspect of his appearance was impossible for a Man, not his height (though he’d end up being an NBA player if he was American) or hair or skin. And yet, all of it put together created something… terrifying. Beautiful, but terrifying. She’d wondered in the past why the uncanny valley didn’t seem to come into play where Elves were concerned. Well, it did. Some part of her was begging for the strangeness to all be in her mind, because if it wasn’t, then she was traveling with something like a monster – a monster that walked around in a human suit. Maybe hobbits were just so used to seeing the difference between themselves and Men that they didn’t mind it in Elves, and only the beauty was left. But then again, the hobbits she’d seen hadn’t bothered her nearly this much. This was a problem with elves in particular.

And, oh God, the way he made the Nazgûl, incarnations of fear itself, run for their lives (so to speak)? It reminded her of the line from one of the Tenth Doctor stories in Doctor Who: “ _What do monsters have nightmares about?” “Me!”_ Comforting when there were clockwork robots under your bed or when undead creatures were chasing you on horseback, but really, what kind of being could be so terrible that even the most horrifying creatures in the world would run from them?

“I am not a wraith. I do not wish to harm you or take you captive. I will bring you safely to Imladris if I am able, and if you will allow me.”

That was how he saw her, wasn’t it? Not allowing him to do what he needed to do. Of course, he could always go ahead of her, but he thought it was his duty to protect her. And she needed his protection.

“And you, also, wish to reach Imladris safely.”

She nodded.

He smiled again. “Good. Then we are in agreement, after all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) The one piece of fanon/questionable canon that I couldn’t really mess with was Glorfindel being reincarnated. It’s necessary for this fic, and it makes a lot of sense and adds extra layers to the books. But his reincarnation and return is different in this story from how it’s usually portrayed. For one thing, it’s not super weird for an Elf to be re-embodied (AKA rehoused, but I like the word re-embodied better), it’s just weird for one of the Noldorin exiles to be re-embodied. It’s said in the story of Míriel that people died in accidents and came back reasonably often in Valinor. It’s actually entirely possible that some of the exiles were already in their second life, just not anyone notable. Also, according to the Glorfindel essays, he was re-embodied very soon after his death and lived for a long time in Valinor again. He didn’t just get dumped in Middle Earth in a brand-new body in the middle of the Second Age.
> 
> 2) Glorfindel is low-key an eldritch abomination. Ancient? Impossible to permanently kill? Incomprehensibly powerful? Body and mind don’t quite work the same way as ours? He even has a “true form” we can’t see (a being of white light)! So Mallory is just going to have to deal with the occasional thought of “what the hell is that thing and how did it get a human body?!”
> 
> 3) This all reminds me of a hilarious tag on the fic “And Glorfindel for the Elves”: <https://archiveofourown.org/works/18009854> Weirdly, it’s almost the only Glorfindel-goes-with-the-Fellowship AU. Why don’t people write that sort of thing instead of the three hundredth identical Glorfindel/Erestor fic (which I’ll read anyway because I’m desperate)?
> 
> 4) The quote, by the way, is from “The Girl in the Fireplace,” which is series 2 episode 4, and both my first and favorite Doctor Who episode ever.
> 
> Beta by Xrai


	13. 12: Hope Fades

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The panic attacks keep coming, the cold is worse, and now there’s a new problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess this can count as Diverse Tolkien Week, maybe for disability.

_**October 17** _

Mallory woke up at dawn to Glorfindel gently shaking her, saying musical words she didn’t understand. She looked at him, tired and confused.

“Wake, Silent Rider,” he said. The pieces of the words seemed to settle into place like sand floating down. She wasn’t having a panic attack, was she? No, she was just _really_ tired. She groaned and shielded her eyes against the little bit of light that was coming from the sky. It was almost sunrise, but she wanted to go back to sleep.

“No,” he said, shaking his head and offering her a hand. “Sit up.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, shook herself, and then opened them, feeling marginally more awake.

She let him put her boots back on her feet before stumbling around camp on her own. There was a swallow of miruvor for her, of course, but it didn’t have much effect. She did her best to eat – she’d lost her appetite again. Then, they packed up. She tried to mount Kaza, but she couldn’t get enough energy to jump that high.

Glorfindel came over to her as she got ready to try again. She shook her head at him. She’d had trouble getting up before – he _was_ too tall for her, after all – but she’d always made it in the end.

“He will not appreciate your continued attempts,” said Glorfindel, holding out his hand. “It will be better for him if you accept assistance.”

Kaza nickered as if to say that he was right. Mallory sighed and stepped onto his proffered hand. She was glad to get back in the saddle, even if her legs did hurt, because she didn’t have to move as much on a horse as she would if she was walking. Glorfindel was still on foot, looking for tracks ahead of them, with Asfaloth by Kaza’s side.

She was cold. She was colder than she’d been since Glorfindel found her. Her hands hurt. She was miserable, and she wanted this to end. Of course, it wasn’t going to do that anytime soon. If she was counting her days right, it was the seventeenth, and they wouldn’t reach the Ford until the twentieth. And that was if… if…

Well, she wouldn’t be able to change the story if she didn’t survive long enough to get to the hobbits.

Maybe it was thinking about the Ford and death that set her off. She didn't know. But suddenly, her heart started racing. Glorfindel glanced at her, and for a moment, she couldn’t breathe at all, willing him to go away. Then, he looked ahead again, and all she had was her own body to deal with.

She found herself floating, carried along behind Glorfindel as if there was a rope around her own body. She tried to feel the saddle under her, or Kaza’s mane in her hands, but she might as well have been on a cloud. Or maybe she was a cloud, herself.

 _Breathe, and you will come back to Earth,_ she told herself. _Breathe, and this will pass._

She breathed and breathed, and eventually, it did. She was human again, riding her horse. And Glorfindel didn’t look at her again until they stopped at midday. She even got onto Kaza by herself this time, though there was a moment when she didn’t know whether she could hold on before she managed to swing her leg over.

Glorfindel said something. She stared at him blankly.

“It hurts him when you struggle to mount,” he said. “It does not hurt me to assist you. Do you understand?”

She nodded, more responding to the literal question – yes, she'd understood his words the second time he said it – rather than the implied one. But he knew that she didn’t want to hurt Kaza.

They rode on, but there was dread in the pit of her stomach.

* * *

He didn’t address it until that evening, when he said something while she was eating and earned another blank look.

He frowned and asked her a question, then repeated that question when she still didn’t get it. On the third try, it turned out to be, “Do you understand me?”

She nodded.

“But you _are_ having difficulty,” he said.

She nodded.

“Is it because you do not hear me?”

She shook her head.

“My words do not make sense to you, then,” he said.

She took a deep, slow breath and nodded.

He looked concerned. “Do you know why?”

She shook her head.

“This knowledge of languages you have… it is not learning, or you would be able to speak as well as listen. Did Iarwain give it to you?”

What would his next thought be if she told him it was? What would he think if she disagreed, instead? He was good at figuring things out. Then again, even if he guessed that she was from another world, he wouldn’t jump to the idea that she had read about him in a book. That was insane, even for an elf. So she could give him some information. She nodded.

“Then it may be nothing more than distance, or time. I know little of Iarwain or what he is able to do, but I know that he does not have power outside of the borders of his own land. You may have simply gone too far.”

Tom had _wanted_ her to go to Rivendell, though. He would have known if that was going to affect her. But maybe he hadn’t meant for her to have the ability in the first place. Maybe it was only an accident that it had carried on once she left. She just didn’t like how it was going away _now_ , right when the black breath was getting worse.

“Or perhaps it is because of the Riders and will improve again, or perhaps the problem will be gone by morning. I cannot say.”

She could only hope. In the meantime, she needed to focus on his words so she could learn something. She wasn’t sure whether he was speaking Quenya or Sindarin right now, but they were probably close enough that if she picked up vocabulary from one, she could transfer it to the other. She needed to make sure she wouldn't be entirely lost if it went away.

Another thing to worry about. As if she didn’t already have enough.

* * *

_**October 18** _

For the first time in days, Mallory slept badly. When Glorfindel woke her up at first light, she was freezing cold. She managed to get her waterskin open and undo her pants and leggings, but when she pulled her leggings back up, her fingers wouldn’t grip the laces.

She tried it several times. The leggings didn’t have an elastic waistband, and she wouldn't have been able to walk around without tying the laces even back when they had fit properly. She definitely couldn’t now that she was losing weight. But her hands just would not cooperate.

She sat down with her back to a tree, pressed her head against her arms, and took a deep breath. One more try and then she’d… well… do what she had to. She took another deep breath and stood up. She grabbed the two ends in her fists and pulled them tight, wrapped one around the other and passed it through – but she couldn’t make a loop, and she couldn’t move the laces from her fists to her fingers.

_Shit._

There was only one option, whether she liked it or not. She maneuvered the button into place so that the outer pants would help keep things together, and then she dragged herself back over to their camp, holding the strings in her right hand, which seemed to be working slightly better today. Glorfindel glanced up when he heard her coming. He asked something, but she didn’t understand it. Again. This was _not_ good. She held out her hand with the laces, gritting her teeth against tears.

Glorfindel took them and tied them with a few quick motions, then tucked them under her outer pants. He made it look so easy, not because he was an elf, but because it _was_ easy. Then, he asked another question.

She shook her head and shrugged helplessly. He repeated it: “Is that comfortable?”

She nodded, relieved, and he smiled at her comprehension as well as her answer. “You have no need to be embarrassed,” he said.

Easy for him to say. She went and fumbled with her saddle bags for food. Then, she sat down at the fire.

“It will be two more days, perhaps three, until we reach the Ford,” he said. “I cannot say whether we will be free to pass it, but the Nine Riders do not generally allow me to draw them into battle.”

Of course, she knew _exactly_ what was going to happen at the Ford. He was right that they wouldn’t fight him, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a battle.

“There will be some of my own people there,” he continued. “If my work is not done, I will send you with them. Regardless, you have only a few days left of traveling.”

God, he was really that worried about her? Giving her a pep talk, encouraging her that she was going to survive?

But she couldn’t tie a knot, and whatever was going on with the faulty translation…

Yeah, she was as worried as he was.

* * *

She tried to listen to the words behind the meanings that day, so she could pick up on something that would help her if things kept going this way. It wasn’t easy, though, to focus on random sounds when she could pay attention to something that made sense instead. During a short rest at a stream, she whispered a few words to herself to see if they were correct. This didn’t work out very well: most of the words didn’t translate at all, either because her pronunciation was atrocious or because her Google Translate relied on the speaker themselves knowing what they meant. Of course, Glorfindel, with his elf hearing, noticed what she was doing.

“Those words may not help you,” he said. “Westron is more widely spoken among Men.”

Mallory frowned. He was right, of course, but she was much more familiar with Elvish languages – she’d tried to learn Sindarin a few years ago before giving up in the quagmire of “soft mutations,” dropped final letters, and Tolkien’s indecisiveness about words – and something felt off about Westron, even though that was the equivalent of English in this world.

He looked at her thoughtfully. Then, he sat on a rock, folding up his long legs in a way that didn’t seem quite human. “Listen,” he said.

She looked up, but she dodged away from his eyes to the side of his face, then his mouth.

“Silent Rider,” he said, slowly and clearly.

She tried to hear the sounds that were really coming out: _Rochondín_. It was not an easy word to start with. He repeated it, and she caught enough that she thought she’d be able to recognize it if someone used it later, at least if they were talking slowly. She sat down as well and nodded her understanding.

He said his own name next, which was confusing in a different way, because it wasn’t being translated into “Golden-Hair” or whatever (clever magic, not translating names she already knew), but the pronunciation _was_ altered for her, so she had to really focus. His vowels were different, and the _r_ sound, of course, but he also put the emphasis on the second syllable, which was odd. She’d been sure that Sindarin put emphasis on the third-to-last syllable unless there was an accent mark in the word. There was some basic rule she didn’t know. Encouraging.

He taught her _hungry_ , _thirsty_ , _cold_ , _help me_ , and “relieve myself,” which she got the impression was a euphemism in his language that was being translated into an equivalent euphemism in hers, rather than being given to her word-for-word. She idly reached up to turn her earrings as she focused on the words. At least, she tried to. She couldn’t feel it there. She tried again, judging where her fingers were touching by noting where her ear felt cold, until she thought she had it. She pressed the back of it against her head. She could almost feel there was something hard under her fingertips, but she had no sense of the metal or crystal.

She hadn’t realized it had gotten this bad. Her fingers didn’t feel numb: they still ached with the cold. But they had gone numb, and the rest of her hand would follow, and she wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.

“Silent Rider?” Glorfindel asked in a concerned voice, abandoning his lesson.

That was her left hand. Her right hand had been better today, right? But that was the hand that had gone into the cold stream with her waterskin. She tried it, her heart racing, but to no avail. If she couldn’t see the place she was touching, there was no way to use her eyes to help her, and she had nothing.

“Silent Rider,” said Glorfindel again, getting up to his knees. He pulled her hands away from her head. At first, she resisted, but she knew full well that she wasn’t going to be able to wake up her nerves by touching her earrings over and over, and his touch sent away some of the pain. He pressed her palms together, his hands enveloping hers. “Breathe.”

She took a deep, shaky breath.

“The Riders, the Ringwraiths, they have hurt you. But you can recover from that hurt. This will not last forever. Do you understand me?”

She nodded, swallowing hard.

“Good. Do you think you can get back on your horse?”

She nodded again.

“Will you allow me to help you?”

She nodded.

“Good.” He let go of her hands and supported her arm as she stood up. She let him help her mount, too. She tried to feel the texture of the leather reins in her hands, but the most she could tell was that something was between her fingers. This was Bad.

They finally got going again and headed back onto the Road, and Mallory tried to think about other things. If her count of days was correct, they were supposed to find the hobbits tonight. But what if they didn’t? Considering the timing of the meeting, it would be easy for Glorfindel to make camp just before they met up. She couldn’t let him stop until they’d met them, no matter how hard it was for her to communicate that.

But she didn’t _want_ to meet them. How was that scene going to go? These were the main characters of the story. They _wrote_ the story!

 _It doesn’t matter. What I want doesn’t matter. Defeating Sauron matters._ That wasn’t very comforting, though.

She had that day’s panic attack in the early afternoon. By now, it wasn’t a surprise. Glorfindel didn’t look at her.

 _Breathe_ , she told herself. _This will pass._ Maybe it would, but what was going to happen when she had a panic attack in front of the hobbits? Because with two whole days of traveling with them, the question wasn’t _if_ , it was _when_ and _how often_. She couldn’t handle that, not with five extra people, and people she felt like she knew. She couldn’t do it. She _could not_. But Glorfindel was going to make her, and she couldn’t stop him or tell him what she wanted. She would be trapped, and that made it ten times worse, and she wasn’t going to be able to cope, she couldn’t even cope now –

_But that isn’t happening now. Breathe. It’s okay. Breathe._

That panic attack went on for a long time.

The shaking was finally easing off when Glorfindel stopped to study some tracks. These were obvious: even Mallory noticed a hoofprint in the dirt when she got down and walked off to find something to hide behind and use the bathroom. She wasn't very successful: it looked like her cloak was going to give her more cover than any scenery today.

He was smiling when she came back. “These tracks are not old,” he said. “We may be able to meet them before nightfall. But do not stop!”

 _Before nightfall would be exactly right,_ Mallory thought. And she had no doubt that she wouldn’t be able to stop, whether she wanted to or not. She was entirely sure that if she did _anything_ he didn’t like, he would tie the horses together again and wouldn’t let her go until he put Frodo on Asfaloth’s back. There was no way to avoid meeting them.

 _Good_ , she told herself.

She couldn’t even think about how the meeting was going to go. She just had to focus on what was best for Frodo. He was the important one now.

Glorfindel mounted and sent Asfaloth down the road at a quick pace. Mallory was happy to see that Kaza waited for her to signal for him to trot and then canter rather than following the cues Glorfindel gave Asfaloth. He still listened to her, and that was a relief. But something also upset her about cantering. After all, this was the fastest they’d gone since they had run from the Black Riders.

 _This time, we’re not the victims,_ she thought. _We’re the rescuers._

Only she wasn’t, not really. She was a burden. She got in Glorfindel’s way and slowed him down. She didn’t belong here. So why was this where she was?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) I originally 100% intended for Mallory to learn Westron, because of course that’s what they would teach her, but I kept running into ways that it was going to be annoying and difficult for both me and the characters, so I finally gave up and gave her Sindarin instead. Use Glorfindel’s foresight for an in-story explanation.
> 
> 2) Another thing I don’t ever see addressed in Girl-Falls-into-Middle-Earth fics is pronunciation. If I went to Middle Earth and started dropping names and words I knew (see: Penny and Halbarad in Don't Panic!), they would probably be completely unrecognizable due to me Anglicizing them to hell.
> 
> 3) On that note, what pronunciation rule does Mallory not know? Well, despite researching Sindarin pronunciation in order to choose her English name, it wasn’t until I heard three different people “mispronouncing” GLORfindel as GlorFINDel for me to go reread Appendix B. Lo and behold, the second-to-last syllable in a word is stressed if the vowel is followed by two consonants. This would also be true for names like Erestor, Mithrandir, Imladris, and probably Elessar. Some of those I already pronounced correctly, but some (Mithrandir) are going to take a lot of practice.
> 
> 4) Remember, the way the Google Translate (term stolen from a reviewer) works (when it’s working) is that it shuffles through Mallory’s head for something that matches the word she just heard. If she has (an Anglicized version of) that word in her head already, it goes to that; if not, it translates. Therefore, “Glorfindel” is “Glorfindel”, but “Rochondín” is “Silent Rider”. It works on a slight delay because words change according to context.
> 
> Beta by Xrai


End file.
